Scientists Race To Create Synthetic Blood in the Wake of Mass Tragedies (vice.com) 99
An anonymous reader shares a report: Scientists have been working on creating synthetic blood for years now. The hope is that this substance will have a longer shelf life than human blood -- which can only be refrigerated for 42 days -- and eventually can be packaged and stored for use in emergencies. If this works, thousands of lives could be saved every year. "People can't show up fast enough and then the system can't draw their blood fast enough to meet the need," said Allan Doctor, a physician and researcher at the Washington University in St. Louis. Doctor's lab has been working to create a blood substitute called ErythroMer, comprised of human hemoglobin, sourced from the red blood cells in expired blood at blood banks, and a synthetic polymer. This synthetic blood is actually a dehydrated powder, which would allow it to be stored for years, rather than weeks, and easily transported. Doctor envisions that it could eventually be packaged along with purified water so that doctors or EMTs could mix it when they needed to use it on a patient. ErythroMer is still in the planning stages. It has only been tested on animals, and Doctor predicts that the team is about three to five years from the first human trials. Following that, it will need FDA approval, and then healthcare workers will need to be trained to use it properly to avoid infections. "It's important for us to have a bulletproof delivery system," Doctor told me. He predicts that it will be available in six to 10 years if the trials are successful, and if they can make a cost-effective formula. There are different approaches to creating synthetic blood, which is technically just a way of transporting oxygen in the body. In 2013, a team in Romania announced that they were making it with albumin, a liver protein, and hemerythrin, a protein extracted from worms. In the UK, scientists with the National Health Service have been testing lab-grown red blood cells.
Slow down, scientists (Score:4, Funny)
I'm not sure I see how racing is going to help them create synthetic blood. Shouldn't they be doing research instead?
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Holy cow! What a great idea -- synthetic and alternatives to human blood! If only someone had thought to start research on it centuries ago!
Why did no one think of this??? It's obvious we can use it...in hindsight.
Talk about Captain Obvious. Duh to all of us, all humanity!
They will call it (Score:2)
....have a bulletproof delivery system... (Score:3)
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Re:OR we could just stop... (Score:4, Funny)
I'm guessing the OP it's a native American demanding that Europeans go back to Europe.
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It's a fair point. Native Americans have historically been disproportionately on the receiving end of mass shootings by white guys.
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ISIS claims they radicalized him.
I think everyone knows by now that ISIS is full of shit.
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[...] more like it was a CIA op for a gun grab and pinning it on ISIS doesn't fit the desired narrative, even if they did facilitate it.
My favourite conspiracy theory is that it was a false flag operation by gun manufacturers to make their stock prices and sales go up (as they reliably do after massacres).
It's just as plausible.
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I smell a false flag post.
Or you could just... (Score:1, Insightful)
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So only the rich have access, which is essentially what it would be if ALL guns were banned.
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See, the difference is that those things you mention have uses beyond killing people or the threat of killing people.
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> See, the difference is that those things you mention have uses beyond killing people or the threat of killing people.
Sometimes to save lives and liberty you have to kill people or meaningfully be able to threaten such. That's why Americans have a right to bear arms.
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Are you saying that occasionally the tree of liberty has to be watered with the blood of hundreds of civilians at a country music concert?
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Haha.
That's not a strawman you built there, that's a whole Wickerman [wikipedia.org].
He meant be able to kill (or hurt, doesn't have to kill) people who threaten and attack you, i.e. muggers, murderers, rapists, etc.. not innocent people.
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There is no scientific correlation between gun ownership and being safe.
You are correct. There's three possible correlations:
- More guns = more crime
- More guns = less crime
- More guns = simply more guns
I did a study on this for a graduate level statistics class. While I did not compare gun ownership rates I did compare the gun laws of various states. I suspect greater restrictions on ownership correlates to ownership. The best I found was some very weak correlations to gun laws and crime. Increased restrictions correlated to increased rates of rape and decreased robberies
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There's three possible correlations:
Somebody likes oversimplifications, don't they?
Over simplify? What other correlations are there besides increasing, decreasing, or no change? You can complicate this with giving rates of increase or decrease but how does that help?
You just invalidated your own purported study. It took you only two more sentences.
I guess if we look at the data one has a choice, robberies or rapes. Total crime is effectively unchanged but when one goes the other takes it's place.
Nope. You shouldn't guess, especially when it's easy to recognize the flaw in your premise.
You're just acting like "rapist" and "robbers" are interchangeable, but that really isn't very believable.
Whether you find it believable or not that's what I found in my study. I used the FBI UCR for my data set on crimes committed and the Brady Campaign score on the gun laws of every state.
And you didn't name them. Here's a something [vox.com] though.
They committed the same crime I warned about, incomplete data. They compare nations on "gun violence" but leave out any crimes committed w
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Well, the studies would not agree with your assessment.
US may have the highest gun homocide rate, but remove guns from legal and law abiding owners and it would likely actually increase.
https://www.democraticundergro... [democratic...ground.com]
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And what percentage of mass murderers in the US were gun owners?
https://www.washingtonpost.com... [washingtonpost.com]
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When was the last time guns were used in the US for "killing tyrants"?
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There's a new meme floating around that the number of gun deaths in the US is just now passing the number of war deaths. This Is Bad. Or Something.
Nevermind that most of these are suicides, not murder. (Still an issue, but not the Big Scary they intend rhetorically.)
Nevermind that the US has had very few war deaths compared to its population size compared to basically every other country.
Nevermind that most countries lost those lives because of dictatorship, whose first order of business is outlawing gun
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Do you honestly think German citizenry would have gathered up its weapons and invaded Poland, and then France, without a government led by Hitler or someone like him?
If so, you're completely detached from reality.
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Those in government do not generally have as their primary goal murder. Their goal is to gain ever more power over people, and the use of various threats including the threat to kill is how that power is achieved. The threat to kill doesn't amount to much unless it's demonstrated occasionally: Waco.
Most of the people in the volunteer U.S. military are honorable in a way and to a degree incomprehensible to most people outside the military. People drafted are frequently resentful, and an unnecessary draft in
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Re: Or you could just... (Score:1)
More Americans are killed by cars than by guns.
A rhetorical statement with no particular value. Not only is automobile safety a particularly important concern, the exposure rates are quite different. How would you even control for the fact that the average American is around a functioning automobile at a rate far exceeding that of being around even a holstered firearm?
I swear, it is like people just sputter useless facts without thinking.
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Because this sophisticated approach has worked so well for preventing the use of recreational drugs...
Anyway, kudos to the scientists who are hacking around the ban on selling blood, but speaking of bans, we need to get rid of the ban on selling blood. Coincidentally, my team and I were working through a protocol two weeks ago to use a blockchain-based bloodbank protocol to allow this to be done safely and to improve public health and reduce Medicaid spen
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Earlier this week I tried looking to see if there had ever been a challenge to the National Firearms Act that reached the Supreme Court. I was expecting to find something but I didn't, which is surprising. Maybe there has been a challenge, I'd like to know what it was and the outcome of it. I would be quite interested in knowing it because we do know that since the founding of the country, private individuals had owned artillery pieces without problem.
Events in Las Vegas are useful for bringing light to an
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I also think we should ban handguns or limit them severely.
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You haven't been paying attention. That's precisely what Hillary has been yowling for in the aftermath of Las Vegas.
What about the process... (Score:3)
...specifically requires mass tragedy to create the synthetic blood? Is it some Fullmetal Alchemist "Law of Equivalent Exchange" type thing?
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A Mass tragedy of the type in Vegas requires large amounts of all blood types in a very short period of time, which wipes out the normal amount that is stored on site.
This means getting in Donors or blood from other areas.
A Synthetic blood is hope to have a long shelf life (years not months) and be universal, suitable for all patients. Which means larger volumes can be stored locally without the worry of date expiration.
A better option that wor
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And while you try and become a civilized country, try the metric system, even in the USA I think most of you can count to 10
I can count to ten, I'm way ahead on the conversion to metric. I have my 9mm Luger, 10mm Auto, and 7.62 NATO. I'm keeping my .45 ACP though, there's some family history behind that.
Anyone that thinks gun bans will work to reduce gun ownership or violent crime is insane. There's enough people with scrap metal, CNC mills, and time to make working firearms on their own. Oh, and ammunition too. What is the government going to do about it? Things changed since this "assault weapon" nonsense started 30 or s
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you forgot to add that all of them are building nuclear reactors in their backyards.
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I gave no such threat. I spelled out a very basic cause and effect. If you cause harm to one of the many veterans in the USA then you can expect them to react to prevent further harm.
This is how I expect any other person to act, if you break into their home in the middle of the night then expect to get shot. The difference is that there are 20 million veterans that have been trained in the use of firearms by the best trained military in the world and therefore have the ability to respond more effectively
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An assault weapon is defined in a kind of silly manner. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Assault_weapon [wikipedia.org] In many cases, an assault weapon can be turned into a non-assault weapon by simple actions such as removing a lug meant for attaching a bayonet, or grinding off threads that would be used for attaching a suppressor or muzzle brake. In both cases, the non-assault weapon would be
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Really? (Score:2)
Weird But True... (Score:3)
A decade ago, the president of the California Medical Association was Dr. Richard S. Frankenstein:
http://www.cmanet.org/news/pre... [cmanet.org]
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His name is Allan Doctor? I guess his career was a foregone conclusion.
Ya, but... T. J. Hooker [wikipedia.org] was a cop.
France already has freeze dried blood (Score:2)
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Guns, Blood, and Stocks (Score:2)
Gun manufacturers, blood manufacturers, and stock manufacturers. Any other shares I should invest in?
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I saws this movie. It makes the Vampires explode. Plus, the blood farming procedure tended to slowly kill the humans.
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