Speaker 1: Hey, Doc, I've been thinking I need a new blood. Oh,
Speaker 1: the animal blood it's not working. Yeah, I tried it.
Speaker 1: It made me crash my car, made me feel you know,
Speaker 1: about three feet thick. Well what about true blood? Just
Speaker 1: hit the market? Headache, dry mouth, made my eyes too red. Well,
Speaker 1: there's currently a clinical trial for something called day Breaker.
Speaker 1: I'll stop you right there, Doc, I got some on
Speaker 1: the black market. Made me vomit and explode. But what
Speaker 1: exactly are you looking for? Well, you know, I don't
Speaker 1: want to go crazy with hunger. I don't want my
Speaker 1: things too long. I also don't want it to spill
Speaker 1: or come in a pill. Now, now you're rhyming again.
Speaker 1: Have you been taking your syntho gore because that's one
Speaker 1: of the withdrawal symptoms. I'm all out, Doc, and I
Speaker 1: don't imagine you have anything else around here on tap,
Speaker 1: welcome to Stuff to Blow Your Mind, production of My
Speaker 1: Heart Radio. Hey you, welcome to Stuff to Blow your Mind.
Speaker 1: My name is Robert lamp and I'm Joe McCormick. And
Speaker 1: here we are covered in blood. That's right. Last year
Speaker 1: we put out a Halloween episode titled I Drink Your
Speaker 1: Blood Type, all about blood types. That you know humans have,
Speaker 1: but with a vampire flavoring. I think we did a
Speaker 1: fun skit at the beginning of that one. Um we
Speaker 1: briefly mentioned synthetic blood in vampire fiction. In that one,
Speaker 1: I remember we did reference true blood as well as
Speaker 1: a nineteen thirty nine film titled The Return of Doctor X,
Speaker 1: which I haven't seen yet. I still haven't seen this one,
Speaker 1: but it stars Humphrey Bogart as an evil doctor with
Speaker 1: this kind of like skunk streak in his hair and
Speaker 1: round glasses who's been brought back to life with synthetic blood.
Speaker 1: The hair suggests elsa Anchester like in bright A Frankenstein.
Speaker 1: It does. Yeah, you definitely can see the Frenstein d
Speaker 1: NA um maybe even the lazy Frankenstein DNA in this
Speaker 1: costume design. Now, in that episode, like you said, we
Speaker 1: mainly ended up talking about natural uh properties of blood types,
Speaker 1: what evolutionary pressures drove the development of different blood types,
Speaker 1: how that functions in medicine, and then I think we
Speaker 1: also talked about some pseudo scientific beliefs about blood types
Speaker 1: and personality and psychology. But I think we only briefly
Speaker 1: mentioned the possibility of synthetic blood or using something other
Speaker 1: than human blood in your veins. Yeah, that's right, we did.
Speaker 1: We didn't get into the topic all that much, and
Speaker 1: subsequently we had some listeners suggested for October twenty fair.
Speaker 1: So here we are now, first and foremost, we should
Speaker 1: really establish what blood literally is and maybe a little
Speaker 1: bit about what it metaphorically is. So blood is technically
Speaker 1: both a fluid and a tissue, since it's made out
Speaker 1: of similar specialized cells bended in a liquid matrix of plasma.
Speaker 1: It carries oxygen and nutrients to the cells and carries
Speaker 1: off carbon dioxide and other waste products. The heart pumps
Speaker 1: it through the body, but it's also part of the
Speaker 1: larger circulatory system, so organs like the kidney and the
Speaker 1: lung are also important to blood. And of course, if
Speaker 1: we lose enough blood in a short enough period of time,
Speaker 1: we die, as we all know. Yes, uh, And it's
Speaker 1: it's amazing to stop and think how blood is not
Speaker 1: just in your body, but constantly moving throughout it, you know,
Speaker 1: like while you're alive, it never stops. This is one
Speaker 1: of those ideas that sometimes makes me feel the you know,
Speaker 1: the flame run under my skin. It's it's just a
Speaker 1: little too creepy thinking about how even when I'm sitting
Speaker 1: perfectly still and perfectly at rest, the blood is still going.
Speaker 1: It's rushing through every inch of me. And that's true
Speaker 1: for all of us, of course, And so one thing
Speaker 1: I was wondering, actually is how long does it take
Speaker 1: for each red blood cell to circulate all the way
Speaker 1: through your body and make it back to the heart. Uh.
Speaker 1: I was reading an interesting Q and A by the
Speaker 1: Naked Scientists where they worked out the math on this,
Speaker 1: and I thought this was pretty cool. So it depends
Speaker 1: on a number of factors. But their estimate was that
Speaker 1: for most people, the body performs a complete blood circuit
Speaker 1: roughly every minute. And they found this because the average
Speaker 1: adult has, you know, roughly five leaders of blood in
Speaker 1: the body. The average heart pumps about seventy milli leaders
Speaker 1: of blood every time it beats, and the average resting
Speaker 1: heart rate is something like seventy beats per minute. And
Speaker 1: if you multiply all these together, you find that the
Speaker 1: heart circulates about four point nine are close to five
Speaker 1: leaders of blood every minute. So on average, it probably
Speaker 1: takes about one minute for your heart to circulate your
Speaker 1: entire blood volume. And it does this minute after minute
Speaker 1: after minute until you die. Isn't that crazy the longer
Speaker 1: you look at it. Yeah, this idea of this endless
Speaker 1: river of blood just circulating through your body. Now, blood,
Speaker 1: of course, also has taken on various UH additional connotations,
Speaker 1: connotations of heredity, class, race, violence, sacrifice, and more. I
Speaker 1: was reading an article titled bio Securitization, the Quest for
Speaker 1: Synthetic Blood and the Taming of Kinship by Cath Weston.
Speaker 1: The author gets gets a bit deeper into the connotations
Speaker 1: that will be discussing today, but there were several aspects
Speaker 1: worth highlighting. First of all, just the idea of royal
Speaker 1: blood and the divine right of kings, the idea that
Speaker 1: there's like literally there's something in the bloodline, UM, the
Speaker 1: idea of blood is a signifier of kinship, the idea
Speaker 1: of the idea that your relatives are your blood relatives, etcetera,
Speaker 1: and UH. An interesting thing that Weston points out to
Speaker 1: is a historical tidbit is that blood transfusion UH during
Speaker 1: its history has been objected to for both religious reasons
Speaker 1: and we'll get into an example of that in a bit,
Speaker 1: but also for reasons steeped in racist ideologies. UM. And
Speaker 1: so the you know, the the metaphorical idea of blood
Speaker 1: has often seemed to muddy our biological understanding of blood.
Speaker 1: I think what this comes down to is that in
Speaker 1: many ways, blood is seen as some kind of essence.
Speaker 1: That it's not just a part of the body that
Speaker 1: plays a particular role in um in energy and the
Speaker 1: oxygenation of tissues and the removal of waste products and
Speaker 1: the circulation of chemicals, hormones and things throughout the body.
Speaker 1: But it also is somehow the soul of the thing.
Speaker 1: It There are properties inherent to the animal or the
Speaker 1: human that are represented by or borne through the blood
Speaker 1: in particular. Yeah, it gets kind of weird when you
Speaker 1: think about the fact that, like, on one hand, to
Speaker 1: think that the blood is not us, that the blood
Speaker 1: is just this this oil that we run on, Like
Speaker 1: that's that's not completely correct. Like the blood we we
Speaker 1: are blood, the blood is part of our body again,
Speaker 1: it's it's tissue and a liquid. But on the other hand,
Speaker 1: it were not just the blood. It's not like if
Speaker 1: you drained our blood out and put us in a jar,
Speaker 1: that's not us in the jar and empty shell over here.
Speaker 1: Like I'm I'm reminded of of myths, for instance, that
Speaker 1: involve something like blood in other beings, like the the
Speaker 1: episode we did on Tallos the Bronze automaton and the
Speaker 1: idea that he had this I corp in his body
Speaker 1: that was like the magical substance that that made him function,
Speaker 1: and that that reveals a lot about how blood was
Speaker 1: was considered in prior ages. Yeah, it's like the oil
Speaker 1: and the car engine, but it's also the it's somehow magical,
Speaker 1: it's somehow bearing the properties of godhood. And when you
Speaker 1: take out the plug and allow all of the I
Speaker 1: cord to drain out, he just kind of comes to
Speaker 1: a halt. Yeah. So indeed, like the idea of taking
Speaker 1: the blood from one person, the blood that is part
Speaker 1: of that person, in putting it into another person, you
Speaker 1: know that that that opens up the door for a
Speaker 1: lot of you know, I guess, uh, you know, metaphorical
Speaker 1: ideas about what that means. What does it mean that
Speaker 1: that person is now in me um or what orient
Speaker 1: in the when there's an injury, What does it mean
Speaker 1: that a lot of me is an out like on
Speaker 1: the pavement. That sort of thing. Now that brings us
Speaker 1: to what we're mainly going to be talking about today
Speaker 1: the idea of blood transfusions. Again, if you lose too
Speaker 1: much blood in a short period of time, you can die.
Speaker 1: One way that we know that that can be prevented
Speaker 1: today is by adding more blood, assuming it is the
Speaker 1: correct sort of blood. When a blood transfusion is done correctly,
Speaker 1: can save lives. It's you know, this is I think
Speaker 1: something that most of us are familiar with. UH and
Speaker 1: as we detailed in last year's episode, which I think
Speaker 1: we recently re ran in our feed UH, one does
Speaker 1: have to get it just right to respect the different
Speaker 1: blood types and this was a significant hurdle to overcome
Speaker 1: in medical science totally. But the idea of synthetic blood
Speaker 1: or a blood substitute, you know, the idea of there
Speaker 1: being something other than blood that you could fill one
Speaker 1: up with when you're you're facing a life threatening shortage. UM.
Speaker 1: The key argument here would be, you know, something could
Speaker 1: be manufactured it ahead of time and some degree kept
Speaker 1: on a shelf for use in times of emergency. So
Speaker 1: this was you know, just decreasing to some extent the
Speaker 1: reliance on blood and tissue donation. UM. I think it's
Speaker 1: also been argued that this would be ideal if you
Speaker 1: were dealing with a very far flung situation. You can't
Speaker 1: have a proper blood bank on hand, but perhaps you
Speaker 1: have some sort of short term substitute that can be
Speaker 1: used instead. But of course, the other side of the
Speaker 1: scenario is that such blood would be a product not
Speaker 1: unlike true blood from the TV show that we mentioned earlier.
Speaker 1: We'll discuss where we are in our quest for a
Speaker 1: true blood substitute, but first we want to explore some
Speaker 1: of the earliest and really some of the weirdest and
Speaker 1: grossest ideas for synthetic blood. It's really a wonderfully bizarre
Speaker 1: bit of history. So one of the sources I was
Speaker 1: looking at here is titled Artificial Blood by Suma and Sarkar,
Speaker 1: and it was published in two thousand and eight by
Speaker 1: the Indian Journal of Critical Care Medicine. And in this
Speaker 1: the author points out that the notion of artificial blood
Speaker 1: has pretty much stirred in the human mind for as
Speaker 1: long as people have bled to death from their injuries.
Speaker 1: Like we've we've realized that there's something and and this
Speaker 1: can get kind of, I think, kind of vague and
Speaker 1: magical as to the you know, the idea that blood
Speaker 1: is important and if we lose it we can die,
Speaker 1: and hey have its loss means death. Perhaps it's uh,
Speaker 1: to add blood is to add life or to restore it. Now,
Speaker 1: certainly there's a there's a mix of magic and myth
Speaker 1: and early medicine here. Uh. Sarkar points to ink and
Speaker 1: folklore depicting something arguably like blood transfusion. I've also seen
Speaker 1: it pointed out elsewhere that Odysseus temporarily resuscitates underworld shades
Speaker 1: by offering them um blood sacrifice in the Odyssey. The
Speaker 1: idea of blood as if not a biological underpinning of life,
Speaker 1: you know, something tied up with our conception of the
Speaker 1: life force. That that passage in the Odyssey is pretty stirring.
Speaker 1: I was looking at a Robert Fagel's translation of it,
Speaker 1: and basically, Odysseus is instructed to um to to flay
Speaker 1: and then burn these um the the the animals and
Speaker 1: sacrificial rams or what have you, in order to like
Speaker 1: draw in the spirits of the dead so that he
Speaker 1: can commune with them. And then of course later on
Speaker 1: he does it. Uh. And it's it's it's actually really
Speaker 1: rather creepy. Yes, and I would say one reason is
Speaker 1: that it contains this older Greek view of the afterlife,
Speaker 1: sort of the pre Platonic view of the afterlife in
Speaker 1: Greek thought, which is less the idea of you know,
Speaker 1: places of possible reward or punishment, and more the idea
Speaker 1: that everyone who dies just dwells forever. In this miserable,
Speaker 1: confused dungeon of shades. All right, on that wonderfully spooky note,
Speaker 1: We're gonna take a quick break, but we'll be right
Speaker 1: back with tales of early blood transfusions. Thank alright, we're
Speaker 1: back now in talking about substitutes for human blood that
Speaker 1: can be hooked up to your veins. One of the
Speaker 1: easiest places you know, you can imagine people would have
Speaker 1: looked is to the blood of other animals. That's right, yeah,
Speaker 1: and uh and and this at this point, we're gonna
Speaker 1: we're gonna move to around uh sixteen sixteen, because that's
Speaker 1: when a man by the name of William Harvey described
Speaker 1: blood circulation, which is going to be key just a
Speaker 1: better understanding of like what's actually going on with blood.
Speaker 1: And in the following years, numerous substances were tried out
Speaker 1: as a stand in for human blood, and the list
Speaker 1: provided by Sarkar in that article I cited earlier is
Speaker 1: pretty horrific. It includes beer, urine, milk, plant resins, and
Speaker 1: of course sheep blood. Now sheep's blood is at least blood, right,
Speaker 1: so at least it has that going for it. And
Speaker 1: and this is known as zeno transfusion. The first documented
Speaker 1: zeno transfusion was conducted by French physicians Jean Baptiste du
Speaker 1: Ni and Paul Imarez in sixteen sixty seven, and it
Speaker 1: apparently successful between a fifteen year old boy and a lamb. Uh. Yeah,
Speaker 1: So this first one was largely reported as successful. I
Speaker 1: think that could be defined in a number of ways,
Speaker 1: depending on what you what you call success. At least
Speaker 1: it was reported that the fifteen year old boy felt
Speaker 1: good afterwards. But this whole saga of Jean Baptiste Denny
Speaker 1: is actually I started looking into this a little bit deeper,
Speaker 1: and the more I looked, the weirder and weirder. God,
Speaker 1: So I want to take a digression here to talk
Speaker 1: about Denny and his his historical context. So one of
Speaker 1: the papers I want to look at is by Benjamin H.
Speaker 1: Chin Ye and I N. H chin Ye, published in
Speaker 1: the Canadian bulletin of medical history in twenty sixteen called
Speaker 1: Blood Transfusion and the Body and Early Modern France. Now,
Speaker 1: a lot of this paper is concerned with what medical
Speaker 1: worldview guided the work of late seventeenth century physicians like
Speaker 1: Denny and Denise contemporaries, and the authors argued that the
Speaker 1: physicians of France in this time did not really have
Speaker 1: a unified system of anatomical theory guiding their work, but
Speaker 1: rather a somewhat contradictory patchwork of contemporary natural philosophy and
Speaker 1: anatomical research with a received background of galenic humoralism. So
Speaker 1: this is the system that you're probably pretty familiar with
Speaker 1: by this time that views health issues as largely related
Speaker 1: to the balance and status of the four humors blood, flim,
Speaker 1: black bile, and yellow bile. This is received from uh,
Speaker 1: not invented by, but sort of shaped and received by
Speaker 1: the Roman physician Galen. Now, the authors of this paper
Speaker 1: tell the story of the first documented zeno transfusion with
Speaker 1: some quotes from the report at the time. As you said,
Speaker 1: the patient was a fifteen year old boy and he
Speaker 1: had already been through twenty round ones of blood letting.
Speaker 1: This was in order quote to assuage the excessive heat
Speaker 1: that was a result of the boy's violent fever. And
Speaker 1: in galenic theory, blood is associated with heat and excitation.
Speaker 1: This is part of the place we get the idea
Speaker 1: of being sanguine, right, you know, having an excess of
Speaker 1: blood makes you sort of a brilliant and excited and energetic.
Speaker 1: But this could be bad in in uh, in galenic thinking,
Speaker 1: by causing fevers, by causing mania, and that sort of thing.
Speaker 1: So they let this guy's blood twenty times, and after
Speaker 1: the twenty bleedings quote, his wit seemed wholly sunk, his
Speaker 1: memory perfectly lost, and his body so heavy and drowsy
Speaker 1: that he was not fit for anything all right. So,
Speaker 1: so basically a situation where the bathtub was too hot.
Speaker 1: Uh let some of the bathwater out. Now it seems
Speaker 1: a bit too cold, right. The problem is that, yeah,
Speaker 1: he's he's appearing sluggish. It seems something is wrong with
Speaker 1: his brain. Maybe he doesn't have memories or much energy.
Speaker 1: Uh So Denny counters this by starting a transfusion. He
Speaker 1: draws blood from the carotid artery of a lamb, and
Speaker 1: then that blood goes into the vein in the boy's arm. Ultimately,
Speaker 1: the boy received about nine ounces of lamb blood, and
Speaker 1: then Denny wrote that quote afterwards, he hath no longer
Speaker 1: that slowness of spirit nor heaviness of body, which before
Speaker 1: rendered him unfit for anything. He grows fat visibly, and
Speaker 1: in brief is a subject of amazement to all those
Speaker 1: that know him and dwell with him. So Danny concludes, Yeah,
Speaker 1: it seems like he's doing good. Uh, And this was
Speaker 1: on June sixty seven. But blood transfusions can be unpredictable.
Speaker 1: There can be wildly different reactions and different patients depending
Speaker 1: on often how the host's immune system in particular responds
Speaker 1: to what's being put into the veins. And as we've
Speaker 1: been taught talking about, despite being on the cutting edge
Speaker 1: of seventeenth century anatomy and new surgical techniques, Denny was
Speaker 1: also still in the grip of Galenism, which had been,
Speaker 1: you know, a dominant force in European medicine since the
Speaker 1: Roman Empire, and which attributed the bulk of medical pathologies
Speaker 1: to imbalances or corruptions in the four humors. And Deny himself,
Speaker 1: he agreed with this. He believed quote, the greatest part
Speaker 1: of our diseases are but results of the distemper and
Speaker 1: corruption of the blood. Now he doesn't say quite every disease,
Speaker 1: but you can imagine he thinks most of them. So like, oh, no,
Speaker 1: you've got arthritis. Uh, your problem is you've got bad blood,
Speaker 1: or you know you've got oh a fever. I think
Speaker 1: that's that's a blood issue. We've got to get some
Speaker 1: of that blood out. And so as a result, he believed, quote,
Speaker 1: the speediest and commonest remedy they have in practice is
Speaker 1: to evacuate the same by phlebotomy. Phlebotomy means blood letting,
Speaker 1: or else refresh it and cool it by juliah. Uh So,
Speaker 1: in other words, if you know, for most diseases, the
Speaker 1: cause is bad blood, and the best treatment is to
Speaker 1: drain the blood out or possibly to give the patient julips.
Speaker 1: The paper doesn't explain what julips means here, so I
Speaker 1: tried to look this up. I think what julips refers
Speaker 1: to here is a flavored drink, for example, rose water
Speaker 1: sweetened with sugar syrup. All right, so this is when
Speaker 1: we talked to say about a mint julip. This is
Speaker 1: the same word. Yeah, I think it was. Later on
Speaker 1: that julip came to often have alcoholic connotations. I think
Speaker 1: at this time it just would have meant a flavored drink,
Speaker 1: not necessarily with alcohol in it. I don't know why
Speaker 1: that is thought to deal with corruption of the blood,
Speaker 1: but that is amazing. You know. Can you imagine you
Speaker 1: show up at the hospital with dingay fever or whatever
Speaker 1: and they're like, you could use some rose water? Yeah,
Speaker 1: Or if the or the two possible treatments on the
Speaker 1: table are bleeding or a sweet drink, it's like, yeah,
Speaker 1: essentially you're gonna have kool aid or they're going to
Speaker 1: drain you into a bucket. Well, it seems like between
Speaker 1: the two, didn't he kind of favored one over the other.
Speaker 1: It seems like he was a bleeder. And yeah that
Speaker 1: that kid had not had twenty julips prior to the lamblood.
Speaker 1: To be fair, I don't know how many julips he had,
Speaker 1: but they did bleed him twenty times. Uh, maybe you
Speaker 1: got a julip every time, who knows. It's like the
Speaker 1: brownie they give you and the when you go to
Speaker 1: donate blood, you know you get brownies. Oh man, I
Speaker 1: get um like peanut butter crackers. Sometimes I get what
Speaker 1: is it? There's a special treat, oh Nutter butters. Sometimes
Speaker 1: there are no I've seen the Nutter butters. Yeah, that
Speaker 1: confirmed in my experience. Like it it forces me to
Speaker 1: equate peanut butter with the blood. Like basically, you know,
Speaker 1: we're thinking about the same thing here. It's like, well,
Speaker 1: I lost some blood, gotta get some peanut butter in there.
Speaker 1: That taste of the Nutter butter or the what is
Speaker 1: it's I was trying to remember the name of the
Speaker 1: little brownie that's got the colorful sprinkle on top that
Speaker 1: they give you sometimes, and Seth chimed in there called
Speaker 1: cosmic brownies. We think, yeah, I've never heard of that.
Speaker 1: I mean, like space I believe Seth space cakes. But
Speaker 1: I don't think you should have one of those after
Speaker 1: blood donation. You should have some space shrimp cocktail after
Speaker 1: blood donation. But anyway, okay, So, so bleedings, bleedings, all
Speaker 1: those bleedings obviously that Denny loves. They can really take
Speaker 1: a toll. As described. You know what happened to this
Speaker 1: fifteen year old so Denise saw blood transfusion from animals
Speaker 1: as a perfect compliment to blood letting, and in his words,
Speaker 1: It's quote the old and corrupt being first evacuated, could
Speaker 1: then make room for the new and pure. So in
Speaker 1: the case of the June sixteen sixty seven transfusion, this
Speaker 1: teenage boy, he's blood twenty times to bring down his fever.
Speaker 1: He's pretty low after that, and then lamb's blood is
Speaker 1: used to revive him with a fresh, clean, non corrupted supply.
Speaker 1: But Denny did not stop there with the xeno transfusions.
Speaker 1: Later that same year, Denny also transfused sheep's blood into
Speaker 1: the veins of a healthy forty five year old sedan chairman.
Speaker 1: Now that means he was one of those guys who
Speaker 1: carries fancy people around in the litter, you know. So
Speaker 1: if you're fancy and you don't want to get your
Speaker 1: boots wet, you can ride in a box where four
Speaker 1: guys carry you on poles. So you have to imagine
Speaker 1: if if this guy is a professional sedan chairman, he's
Speaker 1: probably pretty fit, right, Yeah, he's got to be kind
Speaker 1: of a hoss. And for that reason, I've seen this
Speaker 1: case and the idea that there's no identified cause for it,
Speaker 1: it seems like this was maybe a negative control, just
Speaker 1: like seeing what a transfusion does into a healthy guy,
Speaker 1: and reportedly this guy was fine. And then after that,
Speaker 1: Denis performed a transfusion of Calf's blood on a Swedish
Speaker 1: and nobleman who was dying of an unspecified illness in Paris.
Speaker 1: And the first transfusion this guy got seemed to sort
Speaker 1: of enliven him, bringing him back a bit freshen him up,
Speaker 1: but then he died while in the middle of receiving
Speaker 1: his second transfusion. We don't know why he died. But
Speaker 1: then finally the authors tell the story of how Dennis
Speaker 1: performed again a similar operation on a thirty four year
Speaker 1: old man named Antoine Moroy in an attempt to treat
Speaker 1: a supposed mental illness. I read this case described more
Speaker 1: fully in another paper by James G. Chandler, Teresa L. Chin,
Speaker 1: and Max V. Wool Hour called direct Blood Transfusions in
Speaker 1: the Journal of Vascular Surgery from and I was having
Speaker 1: trouble finding out exactly what Moroy's symptoms were. The main
Speaker 1: report about him. The main symptom that is described is
Speaker 1: that he would quote intermittently disappear from his suburban home
Speaker 1: to indulge in paris Is sensual pleasures. I'm not sure
Speaker 1: if that's actually a symptom of an illness, but right,
Speaker 1: I mean, because certainly that that could go along, that
Speaker 1: could certainly be the practice of one who's suffering from
Speaker 1: a true mental illness. But you know, this could also
Speaker 1: just this could also be a case of sexual addiction
Speaker 1: or they or it could just be you know, merely
Speaker 1: this person had a very you know, exciting sex life,
Speaker 1: and whether they decided to treat yeah, so I don't know,
Speaker 1: but it is widely reported at the time. Everyone says
Speaker 1: he was a known madman. So without any other we
Speaker 1: just have to assume that there is something else going
Speaker 1: on with him, I guess. So. Denny, of course, attributed
Speaker 1: this supposed insanity to humorl imbalance. Deny's solution, well, you've
Speaker 1: got to remove this man's blood and replace it with
Speaker 1: calf's blood, and din he believed that the sweetness and
Speaker 1: freshness of the calf's blood would temper the ardor and
Speaker 1: the boiling of the man's existing blood. So Denny tries
Speaker 1: this out. They bled him of two d ninety milli
Speaker 1: leaders of his own blood, and then they put about
Speaker 1: a hundred and seventy five milli leaders of blood from
Speaker 1: a calf's femoral artery into a vein in Moroy's arm,
Speaker 1: and it was reported that his temperament became more subdued
Speaker 1: by the process. So it was repeated in the presence
Speaker 1: of a number of observing physicians a few days later,
Speaker 1: and the second transfusion did not go as well as
Speaker 1: the first one. Maroy reacted first by he said he
Speaker 1: had lumbar pains, a pain in the lower back, and
Speaker 1: tightness in his chest, and he presented an irregular pulse.
Speaker 1: And then the next day this progressed into vomiting and
Speaker 1: a nose bleed, and maybe most alarmingly, h to quote
Speaker 1: from Denise report, he produced a tall glass of urine,
Speaker 1: as black as if it had been deluded by my fireplace.
Speaker 1: I want to be clear here that it may sound,
Speaker 1: it may come through a little bit like I'm I'm
Speaker 1: purely laughing on my side, but um, this is I'm
Speaker 1: feeling an immense sense of revulsion here. This has just
Speaker 1: giving me the all over. Yeah god, uh So you
Speaker 1: would think this would suggest the transfusion was a bad idea, right,
Speaker 1: that this guy's he's experiencing chest pain, back pain, he's vomiting,
Speaker 1: his nose is bleeding and he's peeing black. Yes, but
Speaker 1: Denny considered it a success, And the reason he considered
Speaker 1: it a success was he interpreted the results of into
Speaker 1: humorl theory. He believed that the black urine was an
Speaker 1: evacuation of excess black bile from the body, which he
Speaker 1: wrote is known to send vapors up into the brain
Speaker 1: which disrupt its function. So, according to Deny, he had
Speaker 1: been mistaken that the problem was too much corrupted blood. Instead,
Speaker 1: the problem was too much corrupted black bile, and the
Speaker 1: transfusion had caused the body to evacuate at all, and
Speaker 1: Dinny believed that his transfusion had somewhat succeeded in curing Moroy.
Speaker 1: It's such a the The history thus far is is
Speaker 1: very fascinating because you know, if you're not familiar with it,
Speaker 1: and you hear about, okay, the first blood transfusion and
Speaker 1: it's going to involve a human and um and and lamb,
Speaker 1: you just assume it's going to end and just disaster
Speaker 1: and just to end in death, and that that will
Speaker 1: be a stumbling block. But then it's not, or seemingly not.
Speaker 1: And then in this case, something that seems like a
Speaker 1: firm warning, um, do not proceed, rethink what you were
Speaker 1: doing is interpreted as a success. Yeah, exactly, though not
Speaker 1: by everyone. I should note because the paper by chin
Speaker 1: Ye and chin Ye notes that there was a rival
Speaker 1: Parisian physician named Guillome Lamie who he disagreed, and he
Speaker 1: argued that the black urine was a negative reaction to
Speaker 1: the calf's blood. But the reason, he said was that
Speaker 1: it was indicative of the body's attempt to purge the
Speaker 1: contamination of a substance that was against its nature, which
Speaker 1: sounds kind of close. But I think this opposition is
Speaker 1: being infused with, you know, ideas of sort of like
Speaker 1: spiritual essential is um that are not really proper in medicine. Uh.
Speaker 1: It sounds to me like Mroy was probably suffering from
Speaker 1: what is now called an acute hemolytic reaction, which is
Speaker 1: a widely known rare side effect of a blood transfusion,
Speaker 1: I guess, more common if it is not a properly
Speaker 1: controlled blood transfusion, and this is where the recipient's immune
Speaker 1: system interprets the donor red blood cells as invasive pathogens
Speaker 1: and attacks them hemolysis in in the name acute hemolytic reaction.
Speaker 1: Hemallysis means the destruction of red blood cells, and then
Speaker 1: the red blood cells under attack release a substance into
Speaker 1: the blood that the body has to try to purge,
Speaker 1: and this substance can cause severe damage to the kidneys.
Speaker 1: And this will sound pretty familiar now. Symptoms of an
Speaker 1: acute hemolytic reaction include, among other things, chest and lower
Speaker 1: back pain, nausea, and dark urine. But then there is
Speaker 1: an even stranger epilogue to the Moroy story. Uh So,
Speaker 1: picking up with what's covered in the Chandler at All paper, Denny,
Speaker 1: of course considered Moroy somewhat cured, and I guess this
Speaker 1: meant that he was no longer a seeker of sensual pleasures,
Speaker 1: at least at first after what happened. And the authors
Speaker 1: here say that at first Maroy behaved as his wife wished,
Speaker 1: but then he became truculent again, and they say this
Speaker 1: was quote prompting her to insist st on another transfusion.
Speaker 1: Moroy refused to cooperate and received no blood, so he
Speaker 1: was going to get a third transfusion, but it didn't
Speaker 1: go forward, and then quote he died that evening, and
Speaker 1: his wife perhaps with the encouragement of some physician critics,
Speaker 1: accused Denny of killing her husband. Denny was tried for
Speaker 1: manslaughter but exonerated when it was discovered that Mrs Moroy
Speaker 1: was poisoning her husband with arsenic and then the following year,
Speaker 1: the French Parliament enacted a ban on transfusion of blood
Speaker 1: into humans, so he tries to do this third transfusion
Speaker 1: doesn't work out. Maroy dies, his wife is found to
Speaker 1: have been poisoning him, or at least is believed to
Speaker 1: have been poisoning him, and then we get a ban
Speaker 1: on on transfusions in France. But it also doesn't stop
Speaker 1: there because while you can imagine it's common enough for
Speaker 1: a person to be murdered by a spouse, the story
Speaker 1: gets even more complicated. I was reading about a book
Speaker 1: by a Vanderbilt University historian named Holly tuck Her that
Speaker 1: argues the case for a conspiracy of rival physicians to
Speaker 1: intentionally murder Antoine Mouroy and framed Deny fore causing his death. Now,
Speaker 1: I haven't read this book. That sounds extremely interesting, but
Speaker 1: I want to give you the gist, mostly based on
Speaker 1: a review in the Journal of Clinical Investigation by Neil Blumberg. So,
Speaker 1: to start, we know that Denise galenic humor theory was
Speaker 1: hopelessly misguided. Right, This is not a good basis for
Speaker 1: medical intervention. There is no reason to think that blood
Speaker 1: from a docile lamb will treat mania and humans mental
Speaker 1: illness doesn't work that way, and there's no way to
Speaker 1: predict or prevent which of these would result in a
Speaker 1: severe or life threatening rejection of the donor blood. But
Speaker 1: despite how misguided and dangerous Denise treatments were, Denise rivals
Speaker 1: opposed them for almost equally misguided reasons. A lot of
Speaker 1: these I think some were probably just sort of motivated
Speaker 1: by ambition, you know, they were kind of temporal and
Speaker 1: political rivalries. But many of Denise opponents had extreme religious
Speaker 1: and conceptual opposition to blood transfusions. For example, some of
Speaker 1: them believed that the transfusion of blood from an animal
Speaker 1: could turn a human into a type of chimera or
Speaker 1: some kind of animal human hybrid. You might become a
Speaker 1: subhuman ware lamb or a ware calf, which is very
Speaker 1: Gary Larson uh. And some also believed that the ingestion
Speaker 1: of foreign blood through transfusion was a slippery slope to cannibalism.
Speaker 1: I'm not quite sure how you get there, but that
Speaker 1: at least was was argued. Yeah, because it's I mean,
Speaker 1: it's not like the humans we're talking about here weren't
Speaker 1: already eating meat, right, Yeah, I would think that the
Speaker 1: eating of meat would more likely give way to cannibalism
Speaker 1: than the transfusion of blood from animals. Yeah. Yeah, And
Speaker 1: this might sound kind of outlandish, like, well, how could
Speaker 1: you get to that, you know, how could you have
Speaker 1: this kind of opposite sh into blood transfusions? But uh,
Speaker 1: I know, the case is made in Holly Tucker's book,
Speaker 1: and Bloomberg himself brings up as a point of comparison
Speaker 1: that quote. One might consider that current disagreements about stem
Speaker 1: cell therapies are similar in nature, as some find it
Speaker 1: impossible to separate considerations of religious belief and scientific approach.
Speaker 1: So even today, we certainly do have, you know, bioethical
Speaker 1: debates that are largely prompted by religious beliefs. That's true,
Speaker 1: that's true. I mean, you know, I certainly think to
Speaker 1: any number of of chimerical um uh studies that have
Speaker 1: come out, you know, there's always going to be that
Speaker 1: that voice of criticism. That's going to raise the specter
Speaker 1: of some sort of uh, you know, man goat hybrid
Speaker 1: or whatever the case may be. Right, this is against nature,
Speaker 1: This is a perversion. Yeah, yeah, the shadow of Frankenstein there.
Speaker 1: At the same time, it's interesting looking at all this
Speaker 1: and thinking about like the sort of spirit that the
Speaker 1: spiritual and religious ideas that are kind of a tribute
Speaker 1: it to the idea of of first and foremost, you know,
Speaker 1: the draining of the blood, the bleeding of the patient,
Speaker 1: but then the idea of well it looks like, uh,
Speaker 1: looks like your treatment didn't take You're still running, trying
Speaker 1: to run off to Paris. We need to replace that
Speaker 1: blood again. It reminds me of some of the criticisms
Speaker 1: leveled at so called young blood transfusion that we've uh
Speaker 1: we we've seen in in in recent years. You know,
Speaker 1: the idea that an an older person could receive the
Speaker 1: transfused blood of a younger person, uh, with some sort
Speaker 1: of health benefits. And I believe this is this is
Speaker 1: largely seen as pseudo scientific um. But but but I
Speaker 1: can I can see some of the same energy in
Speaker 1: young blood transfusion that you see kind of attributed to
Speaker 1: the the you know, the poorly understood nature of blood
Speaker 1: transfusion at the time in the UH the seventeenth century. Yeah,
Speaker 1: I can totally see that, like this view of there's
Speaker 1: some kind of unholy experiment that's being done in in
Speaker 1: dark rooms that we don't have access to. And by
Speaker 1: the way, anyone who watched the television series Silicon Valley
Speaker 1: you might remember the the the young blood UH thing
Speaker 1: being a part of the plot as the Holy Founder. A.
Speaker 1: Gavin Belson at one point has a quote unquote blood
Speaker 1: boy who was responsible for providing him blood transfusions to
Speaker 1: UH as as a as a believe like a life
Speaker 1: hack to keep him young. Home man. Well, it's interesting
Speaker 1: again to compare to the case of Dennis and his rivals.
Speaker 1: I mean, well, maybe I should finish it first and
Speaker 1: then say this. So. In the end, Holly Tucker's book
Speaker 1: makes the argument that it was denise opponents, especially a
Speaker 1: physician named Henri Martin de la Martiniere, who arranged the
Speaker 1: murder of the patient of Antoine Mouroy by giving arsenic
Speaker 1: to Moroy's wife and encouraging her to poison him. Ultimately,
Speaker 1: she argues this was in an attempt to discredit Denise
Speaker 1: medical theories, and it's a it's a case where there's
Speaker 1: really no good guys because if you know, if Holly
Speaker 1: Tucker's theory is correct, and they really did this, it
Speaker 1: was a case of two camps that were both entirely
Speaker 1: wrong fighting over this conceptual biomedical space. Oh wow, this
Speaker 1: is such a wonderful bit of a bit of history. It.
Speaker 1: I wonder if this has been adapted in any kind
Speaker 1: of historical drama, because it's perfect for that sort of thing. Yeah,
Speaker 1: absolutely so. Anyway, that that is the very weird story
Speaker 1: of early zeno transfusion in sixteen sixties France. Now, xeno
Speaker 1: transfusion is technically still on the table today, but it's
Speaker 1: generally not practiced with humans today because generally human blood
Speaker 1: is much more forthcoming. Um but uh, but yeah, this
Speaker 1: this strange history of of of blood, not just as
Speaker 1: zeno transfusion, but again, thinking of the idea of like
Speaker 1: beer and urine or or milk being used. Uh, this
Speaker 1: brings to mind the various alternative bloods you often encounter
Speaker 1: in humanoid beings in sci fi and fantasy. You know,
Speaker 1: I instantly think of the milk white blood in Ridley
Speaker 1: Scott's various androids or the yellow blood that you see
Speaker 1: in Phantasms the Tall Man, or in the The Androids
Speaker 1: of Halloween three, one of my favorites. Yeah. Um. Now,
Speaker 1: on the subject of milk, Sarkar rights that indeed, in
Speaker 1: eighteen fifty four, milk was injected into the veins of
Speaker 1: patients with the asiatic cholera, thinking that it would help
Speaker 1: regenerate white blood. Sells, Oh, maybe is it like a
Speaker 1: color match thing. That's what it sounds like. Now. The
Speaker 1: thing is enough patients survived that they kept trying it.
Speaker 1: They're like, well, nobody's dying. It seems like they're eventually
Speaker 1: getting better. Let's just keep doing it. And there's a
Speaker 1: lot of skepticism about the practice even at that time,
Speaker 1: and this never really took off. There is so much
Speaker 1: of medical history in a way, it's almost it's amazing
Speaker 1: that medicine exists at all, because I don't know what
Speaker 1: the year was, where on the whole medicine became more
Speaker 1: helpful than harmful. It's like shockingly recent. If you go
Speaker 1: not even all that far back into the past, it
Speaker 1: seems like the majority of medical interventions were just like
Speaker 1: painful and terrible and did nothing to help and maybe
Speaker 1: it would kill you. Yeah. Once again, I come back
Speaker 1: to that that that excellent Soderberg television series The Nick,
Speaker 1: which takes place in New York City and nine D
Speaker 1: and it's just portraying just the cutting edge of medicine
Speaker 1: at the time, and even you know then you see
Speaker 1: like just the catastrophic ways they get it wrong at times. Uh,
Speaker 1: you know, be at things like blood transfusions or drug
Speaker 1: interactions or the use of X rays. Now, in terms
Speaker 1: of other potential blood substitutes, things you can put into
Speaker 1: the body in place of at least some of the blood, uh,
Speaker 1: sailing solutions seemed to promising, uh solution for a bit
Speaker 1: fair as doctors found that you could give a frog
Speaker 1: a complete transfusion of sailing and it would survive, though
Speaker 1: only for a short while. Um. However, that this is
Speaker 1: the stuff was stally developed as a plasma volume expander. Now,
Speaker 1: Sarkar does not go into detail about the beer and
Speaker 1: the urine um tidbits, but they certainly don't highlight them
Speaker 1: as successes. So UM, I assume they were not, you know,
Speaker 1: huge medical successes. Now, in the eighteen hundreds, hemoglobin and
Speaker 1: animal plasma seemed promising, but there were technical hurdles to
Speaker 1: isolating enough hemoglobin, and animal blood um often contain toxins
Speaker 1: that we're challenging to remove at the time. In eighteen
Speaker 1: eighty three, the creation of Ringer's solution. This is named
Speaker 1: for Sydney Ringer, who lived eighteen nine. UH. This changed
Speaker 1: things a bit. Uh. So this is a solution of sodium,
Speaker 1: potassium and calcium salts that was found to restore healthy
Speaker 1: blood pressure after blood volume loss, and it's still used
Speaker 1: today as a blood volume expander, but it does not
Speaker 1: actually work as a blood substitute. Again, we have to
Speaker 1: think of all the things that that blood does, and
Speaker 1: this particular solution it doesn't, for instance, do anything that
Speaker 1: red blood cells do, such as carrying oxygen. Because again,
Speaker 1: the human body is not just a big blood balloon.
Speaker 1: You know, It's not just about warm volume. It's about
Speaker 1: the vital function of the blood. So you can boost
Speaker 1: the volume, but you still need something in the veins
Speaker 1: doing the things that blood does. Now, as we discussed
Speaker 1: in our previous episode on blood types, UH, the Austrian
Speaker 1: UH immunologists and pathologist Carl Landsteiner, who of eighteen sixty
Speaker 1: eight through ninety three discovered the primary a bio blood
Speaker 1: groups around the years nineteen hundred or nineteen o one.
Speaker 1: At the time, doctors knew that many blood transfusions caused
Speaker 1: adverse reactions in their recipient, mainly agglutination, which is where
Speaker 1: the red blood cells clumped together. Blood transfusion technology advanced
Speaker 1: a great deal from from that point on, and um
Speaker 1: an interest in blood substitute was renewed, especially during the
Speaker 1: World Wars of the twentieth century. I think I said
Speaker 1: this in the Last Blood episode, but I can't see
Speaker 1: the name of Carl Landsteiner without thinking of him as
Speaker 1: Carl landst Er. Alright, So fast forward to nineteen sixty six.
Speaker 1: This is when um per floro chemicals or PFC was
Speaker 1: explored as a potential blood substitute. Doctors found that a
Speaker 1: rat's blood could be completely removed and replaced with the stuff,
Speaker 1: but only for a few hours at a time. Uh.
Speaker 1: This stuff then had to be replaced with actual blood,
Speaker 1: but a full recovery was possible. So obviously you can
Speaker 1: see the possibilities there. You know, something something that's not blood.
Speaker 1: We could at least get in there for a little
Speaker 1: bit to stabilize the patient until actual blood can be
Speaker 1: made available. Star Car writes that while there was renewed
Speaker 1: interest during the AIDS epidemic and during Vietnam, for the
Speaker 1: most part, advances in blood banking itself has, you know,
Speaker 1: has resulted in less research for the idea of a
Speaker 1: true blood substitute, because ultimately, nothing takes the place of
Speaker 1: human blood quite like human blood. But if we're going
Speaker 1: to have synthetic blood, star Car points out that there
Speaker 1: are a few key uh points that must be met. Okay,
Speaker 1: like what so, First of all, it has to be
Speaker 1: safe and compatible with the human body. Ideally, it should
Speaker 1: also be universal for all blood types. You know, that's
Speaker 1: not an absolute requirement, but certainly, if you're talking about
Speaker 1: something that is just on a hand, say in a
Speaker 1: field hospital situation, to hold the patient over until an
Speaker 1: actual blood bank can come into play, it would be
Speaker 1: nice if it just took care of all humans and
Speaker 1: you didn't have to to deal with type. On top
Speaker 1: of that, it needs to be able to transport oxygen
Speaker 1: throughout the body, and it needs to offer more robust
Speaker 1: shelf stability, such as lasting a year rather than a
Speaker 1: mere month as with donor blood. As such, there are
Speaker 1: basically two major areas of research under way. First of all,
Speaker 1: per floral carbons, these are inexpensive, they're devoid of biological
Speaker 1: materials that could spread infection. However, they're not water soluble
Speaker 1: and they carry much less oxygen compared to hemoglobin based products. Second,
Speaker 1: you have hemoglobin based products, so these are oxygen containing.
Speaker 1: They're involved in oxygen transport with our own red blood cells,
Speaker 1: so it's a great place to start. Now. The downside
Speaker 1: to this direction is that raw hemoglobin would break down
Speaker 1: into toxic compounds, and there are solutions stability issues as well.
Speaker 1: Quote the challenge and creating a hemoglobin based artificial blood
Speaker 1: is to modify the hemoglobin molecule so these problems are resolved.
Speaker 1: So you could depend on either isolated hemoglobin or synthetically
Speaker 1: produced hemoglobin. If it's isolated, the product is actually made
Speaker 1: from human blood, typically blood for transfusions that has already expired.
Speaker 1: Animal blood is another option, apparently, but in this case
Speaker 1: the hemoglobin would need to be modified before use. Hemoglobin synthesis, however,
Speaker 1: is a process that involves the use of a strain
Speaker 1: of E. Coli bacteria that has the ability to produce
Speaker 1: human hemoglobin. There's a process involving bacterial destruction, fermentation and
Speaker 1: isolation in a centrifuge, then final processing via the addition
Speaker 1: of water and electrolytes, so farming it from bacteria. I
Speaker 1: like that. Yeah. Yeah. Now, as as for limitations, again,
Speaker 1: as of this paper's writing, most of the hemoglobin based
Speaker 1: products were lasting no more than twenty to thirty hours
Speaker 1: in the body hold. Blood transfusions last thirty four days
Speaker 1: for comparison. Also, this sort of blood substitute wouldn't bring
Speaker 1: clotting or disease fighting to the table, so that leaves
Speaker 1: its potential again more as a short term solution, something
Speaker 1: to get in the body, uh, while you're waiting to
Speaker 1: access the fruits of blood bank. And of course this
Speaker 1: is not even getting into some of the issues concerning
Speaker 1: biosecurity and privatization of synthetic biology as it concerns ethical dimensions, etcetera.
Speaker 1: Oh wait, so you could have like, uh, somebody's got
Speaker 1: a patent on the blood that's in your arteries right now,
Speaker 1: and yeah, well that's the well, that's the kind of
Speaker 1: thing that's often brought up in these discussions. I mean, however, obviously,
Speaker 1: the way I do, I do think it is important to,
Speaker 1: you know, stress that it would be great if there
Speaker 1: was if we were to develop a pure, you know,
Speaker 1: blood substitute that, even if it only worked for a
Speaker 1: short time, could be kept on hand. You know, that's
Speaker 1: something that that was universal, something with with a decent
Speaker 1: shelf life. Uh, you know, even if it wasn't a
Speaker 1: permanent solution, if it wasn't quite as good as human blood,
Speaker 1: if it could just serve as a as as a patch,
Speaker 1: you know, until a proper blood transfusion can take place,
Speaker 1: that would be immensely helpful. Totally. Should we take a
Speaker 1: break and then come back to talk a little more, Yes,
Speaker 1: thank alright, we're back. So I was looking around for
Speaker 1: for more recent work. I was looking at a two
Speaker 1: thousand seventeen study by Wing at All published in Bio
Speaker 1: macro Molecules, and they point out that hemoglobin on its own,
Speaker 1: like we discussed this toxic, but that a chemically modified
Speaker 1: version forms um methemoglobin, which doesn't bind oxygen. Uh, this
Speaker 1: decreases the oxygen in the blood. In the generation of
Speaker 1: methemoglobin produces cell damaging hydrogen peroxide. So the researchers in
Speaker 1: this case looked into packaging hemoglobin in a quote unquote
Speaker 1: benign envelope in this case um polydopamine or p d A,
Speaker 1: which is already understudy for biomedical applications. Their findings showed
Speaker 1: promise with the package delivering oxygen while preventing the formation
Speaker 1: of meth, methmoglobin and hydrogen peroxide, and this resulted in
Speaker 1: minimal cell damage. I mean, you can see pretty easily
Speaker 1: why you wouldn't really want too much hydrogen peroxide in
Speaker 1: your blood right now on the xeno transfusion front. Uh,
Speaker 1: this was interesting. I came across a case report in
Speaker 1: Clinical Case Reports by Rubinstein at All which discusses the
Speaker 1: case of a fifty seven year old Jehovah's Witness with
Speaker 1: a form of pure red cell um aplasia or pr
Speaker 1: c A. Now, this is a type of anemia that
Speaker 1: impacts the patient's ability to produce red but not white
Speaker 1: blood cells. So blood transfusions are an important form of treatment.
Speaker 1: But the individual in question turned down these transfusions for
Speaker 1: religious reasons. And I believe the stems with the Jehovah's
Speaker 1: Witness faith is an interpretation of abstaining from blood in
Speaker 1: the Bible. I think this is from Leviticus. Yeah, there
Speaker 1: are multiple passages cited by the Jehovah's witnesses. I think
Speaker 1: the most common one is this one in Leviticus chapter seventeen,
Speaker 1: where it says, Uh, for the life of the flesh
Speaker 1: is in the blood, and I have given it to
Speaker 1: you upon the altar to make atonement for your souls.
Speaker 1: For it is the blood that makes the atonement for
Speaker 1: the soul. Uh. And he says, therefore, to the children
Speaker 1: of Israel, you shall not eat blood. And this and
Speaker 1: some other passages are sort of interpreted in a in
Speaker 1: a way to say, well, to be safe in following this,
Speaker 1: you probably shouldn't receive blood transfusions either. But I was
Speaker 1: actually this is this is interesting. There's a whole Wikipedia
Speaker 1: page on the Jehovah's Witnesses and blood transfusions that has
Speaker 1: this gigantic of what types of procedures are allowed and
Speaker 1: what are not allowed according to Church doctrine, because there
Speaker 1: are there's not just one type of blood transfusion. They
Speaker 1: are all kinds of blood related products that you can
Speaker 1: have put into your body, and so there are some
Speaker 1: that they accept and some they don't. In this case, however,
Speaker 1: it seems like it was it was pretty much. A
Speaker 1: don't on the idea of more human blood being put
Speaker 1: into the patient for this treatment, but in this case,
Speaker 1: the physicians used a quote bovine hemoglobin based oxygen carrier quote.
Speaker 1: The patient received more than twenty units of HBOC two
Speaker 1: oh one and was showing early signs of red blood
Speaker 1: cell count recovery. Although the patient did not survive, administration
Speaker 1: of the HBOC two o one did sustain her long
Speaker 1: enough to allow for administration of immunosuppressive therapy, which ultimately
Speaker 1: improved erythropoesis. Thus, administration of alternative hemoglobin based oxygen carriers
Speaker 1: in the setting of red cell at plasia associated with
Speaker 1: thy momus warrants further investigation. And that's interesting. So this
Speaker 1: is a product that is derived from the hemoglobin, the
Speaker 1: oxygen carrying protein that would be found in the red
Speaker 1: blood cells originally of cows or some of their bovine
Speaker 1: And uh yeah, And I think this is in line
Speaker 1: with a lot of the stuff I was seeing about
Speaker 1: Jehovah's witnesses beliefs that um often that they will receive
Speaker 1: certain types of blood products, but the objection more often
Speaker 1: is to whole blood. Now, leaving medical research and uh,
Speaker 1: and religious beliefs. Maybe we should come back to our
Speaker 1: vampire introduction because I think you were hypothesizing that vampires
Speaker 1: might might find themselves rather picky over what types of
Speaker 1: synthetic blood are are tasty or or go well with
Speaker 1: their I don't know what it would it be the
Speaker 1: digestive system, what system receives the blood vampire? Well, I
Speaker 1: guess that's the tricky thing about vampires, right, is that there,
Speaker 1: of course create is a fantasy and interpretations of their
Speaker 1: their blood drinking. It's going to range from the biological,
Speaker 1: the biologically grounded, to the utterly magical. So what like,
Speaker 1: what is the nature of the blood that the vampire
Speaker 1: is drinking? Are they drinking like the magical life force
Speaker 1: of a being, you know, the splendid iy core of
Speaker 1: the Sons of Adam? Or is it like actual blood?
Speaker 1: Are they an actual sangovore much like a vampire bat?
Speaker 1: And obviously, depending on what your answer is is going
Speaker 1: to be, you know, entirely different, and certainly you could
Speaker 1: have You can imagine a situation where you have a
Speaker 1: synthetic blood that is certainly helpful treating individuals who who
Speaker 1: who need it, but is going to be kind of
Speaker 1: useless or at least not all that desired by blood
Speaker 1: drinking supernatural beings. But I thought, you know, what's what's
Speaker 1: the one thing we can definitely do. We can definitely
Speaker 1: look to the vampire bats. We can look at blood
Speaker 1: drinking in the natural world and see if there's anything
Speaker 1: out there that at all relates to this question. So
Speaker 1: I was looking at wanted blood for vampire bats by
Speaker 1: Lynn Laws, writing for the Iowa State University College of
Speaker 1: Agricultural and Life Sciences. So, vampire bats we've discussed in
Speaker 1: the show before typically feed on fresh cow blood and
Speaker 1: only rarely bite humans. Typically for captive vampire bats, and
Speaker 1: like a laboratory or a zoo environment or some sort
Speaker 1: of enclosure, cow blood does the trick um, but in
Speaker 1: zoo conditions, especially, an anticoagulant is added to the blood
Speaker 1: to keep it fresh enough for feeding via little peachy
Speaker 1: dishes that are placed out in the enclosure. Oh I see,
Speaker 1: So like, if you don't add an anticoagulant, you could
Speaker 1: have the same problem you get where you leave the
Speaker 1: soup out and it forms a skin. Yeah, one imagines, yeah,
Speaker 1: that you need to keep you want the blood obviously,
Speaker 1: vampire bats are not going to go around in their
Speaker 1: natural environment drinking blood out of little puddles. Uh, you know,
Speaker 1: so you need to keep it fresh. You need something
Speaker 1: to fresh it up, an anticoagulant see ms to do
Speaker 1: the trick. There apparently have also been experiments with freezing
Speaker 1: the blood, and there's hope that we could eventually create
Speaker 1: a dried powder that could be reconstituted at zoos for
Speaker 1: the bats. So you add water to it and you
Speaker 1: got blood, you know, sort of like a kool aid powder,
Speaker 1: but for blood drinkers. Oh yeah, um, this brings me back.
Speaker 1: I think there's a part in Guillermo del Toro's Blade
Speaker 1: to where like Russian vampires are like snorting lines of
Speaker 1: of like crystallized blood or something or something. You know,
Speaker 1: they're supposed to be crystallized blood. Um. So, I don't know,
Speaker 1: maybe they ran across the same sort of research when
Speaker 1: they were putting together to that film. That's funny. Would
Speaker 1: it be different snorted than it would be just drank? Um? Well,
Speaker 1: I don't know. I mean, it doesn't really, it doesn't
Speaker 1: make a lot of sense that the psychological difference. Yeah,
Speaker 1: I don't know. You get the idea. It's like, as vampires,
Speaker 1: they just like blood. They'll take it anyway they can
Speaker 1: get it. They'll drink it, they'll snort it up their nose,
Speaker 1: they'll freak a bath in it. Yeah, paste the blood,
Speaker 1: smoke the blood. Um. Uh. You know, well whatever serves
Speaker 1: as a useful metaphor for you know, for us to
Speaker 1: use in creating a vampire, like the vampire has addict
Speaker 1: the vampire as as you know, a moral themed etcetera. Now,
Speaker 1: going back to what we're discussing though, in the possibilities
Speaker 1: for for a synthetic blood, if you end up with
Speaker 1: a blood substitute that is actually made from human blood,
Speaker 1: you know, that's the that's depending on the hemoglobin. Uh.
Speaker 1: That would be an interesting scenario, right, because you could
Speaker 1: potentially have fake blood for the vampires to keep the
Speaker 1: vampires at bay, that is actually made from human blood,
Speaker 1: but maybe is like you know, it is the the
Speaker 1: result of of blood bank blood that has not been
Speaker 1: fully utilized. So the vampires might not be really all
Speaker 1: that happy about it. But maybe you know, you wouldn't
Speaker 1: behave be having to just bleed yourself dry for the vampires.
Speaker 1: You would you would have like a secondary product that
Speaker 1: makes them mostly happy. Yeah, they'd be helping us deal
Speaker 1: with medical waste. Yeah, so that would that things kind
Speaker 1: of like a very very much a reduced stature for
Speaker 1: something like Count Dracula. You know, it's like, I know,
Speaker 1: you want to be the Lord of the night and
Speaker 1: you know, drink our blood and have a serview, But
Speaker 1: what if you just gobbled up our medical waste? Are
Speaker 1: you on board? Yes? All right. On that note, we're
Speaker 1: gonna go ahead and close it out here. We're gonna
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