Artifical Blood essays

Artifical Blood essays Every 3.7 seconds someone in the United States is receiving a blood transfusion and a total of thirty million units of blood is transfused throughout the world annually (Cannell 1999)1. In the 1600s Louis XIV physician, Jean-Baptiste, performed the first blood transfusion when he took nine ounces of lambs blood and placed it into a teenage boy. Not only were blood transfusions experimented with on humans but animals too. For example, the English used dogs in their experiments transfusing urine, milk, wine, and other substances. Each of these scientific explorations was all towards accomplishing one goal, to find a substitute for human blood. For decades, scientists have chased the elusive dream of creating artificial blood-blood that would be universally compatible and readily available-and today a handful of U.S. companies is tantalizing close to the finish line (Cimmons 2001)2. Three Bio-tech American companies; Northfield Laboratories, Biopure Corp, and Alliance Pharmaceut ical Corp and a Canadian company, Hemosol are fighting for the recognition to be the first group to have an approved blood substitute sold in the United States. The companies are striving for a substitute that could decrease the blood shortages, and save the lives of millions by providing blood with no contaminations and eliminating the time spent searching for donor blood that is compatible, a potential billion-dollar industry. Blood is essential for the well being of humans. Blood carries the oxygen and nutrients that the body digests from food and carries them to every cell in the body. It also is responsible for removing carbon dioxide and other waste materials from the body. Blood is also essential for forming white blood cells that attack foreign agents in the body, such as bacteria and viruses. Inside one red blood cell there are approximately 280 million hemoglobin protein molecules. It is these molecules that abs...