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From Discover magazine blog
Everyone is enjoying their summer run of HBO’s True Blood, yes? Our team of brooding vampires and charming Louisianans seem to be up to their usual high jinks. For those not into the show, it’s premised on the invention of TruBlood, a synthetic human blood substitute. A few years before the show begins, the Japanese have invented the stuff, and for the first time, vampires can subsist without killing people. They decide that now is the time to come out of the coffin—err, closet—and go mainstream.
But producing synthetic human blood has been a grail of sorts of the medical profession for decades. Imagine, no more public-service messages on the radio, begging for donations, no more blood donor trucks. If synthetic blood came into being, there would be no more searching for exact blood types, or fear of contracting blood-born diseases from transfusions. Heck, the entire blood-for-cookie market would collapse, and I mean that in the best way possible. And it may actually happen, possibly within the next few years.
Last year, scientists working for Advanced Cell Technology (ACT) published results in the journal Blood that showed they could produce functioning, oxygen-carrying red blood cells from stem cells. By selecting stem cells from embryos that produce O-negative blood (universal donor), ACT could theoretically produce synthetic blood that anyone could receive.
Read on
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