Speaker 1: Hey, welcome to Stuff to blow your mind. My name
Speaker 1: is Robert Lamb and I'm Joe McCormick, and it's Saturday.
Speaker 1: Time to go into the vault for an older episode.
Speaker 1: This one was called I Want a New Blood and
Speaker 1: it was originally published October eight, So we're still dipping
Speaker 1: into the Halloween last year's season. Yep, We've we've got
Speaker 1: the fake blood on drip for this one, So let's
Speaker 1: drink up. I'm imagining like a box wine, you know
Speaker 1: in the car bood. Hey, Doc, I've been thinking I
Speaker 1: need a new blood. Oh, the animal blood it's not working. Yeah,
Speaker 1: I tried it. It made me crash my car, made
Speaker 1: me feel you know, about three ft thick. Well, what
Speaker 1: about true blood? Just hit the market? Headache, dry mouth,
Speaker 1: made my eyes too red. Well, there's currently a clinical
Speaker 1: trial for something called day Breaker. Be right there, Doc,
Speaker 1: I got some on the black market. Made me vomit
Speaker 1: and explode. But what exactly are you looking for? Well,
Speaker 1: you know, I don't want to go crazy with hunger.
Speaker 1: I don't want my things too long. I also don't
Speaker 1: want it to spill or come in a pill. Now,
Speaker 1: now you're rhyming again. Have you been taking your synthough gore,
Speaker 1: because that's one of the withdrawal symptoms. I'm all out, doc,
Speaker 1: and I don't imagine you have anything else around here
Speaker 1: on tap, Welcome to Stuff to Blow your Mind, the
Speaker 1: production of My Heart Radio. Hey you welcome to Stuff
Speaker 1: to Blow your mind. My name is Robert Lamb and
Speaker 1: I'm Joe McCormick. And here we are covered in blood.
Speaker 1: That's right. Last year we put out a Halloween episode
Speaker 1: titled I Drink Your Blood Type, all about blood types
Speaker 1: that you know humans have, but with a vampire flavoring.
Speaker 1: I think we did a on skit at the beginning
Speaker 1: of that one. Um, we briefly mentioned synthetic blood in
Speaker 1: vampire fiction in that one. I remember we did reference
Speaker 1: true Blood as well as a nineteen thirty nine film
Speaker 1: titled The Return of Doctor X, which I haven't seen yet.
Speaker 1: Still haven't seen this one, but it stars Humphrey Bogart
Speaker 1: as an evil doctor with this kind of like skunk
Speaker 1: streak in his hair and round glasses who has been
Speaker 1: brought back to life with synthetic blood. The hair suggests
Speaker 1: Elsa Lanchester like in Bright of Frankenstein. It does. Yeah,
Speaker 1: you definitely can see the Frannstein d na um maybe
Speaker 1: even the lazy Frankenstein DNA in this costume design. Now,
Speaker 1: in that episode, like you said, we mainly ended up
Speaker 1: talking about natural uh properties of blood types, what evolutionary
Speaker 1: pressures drove the development of different blood types, how that
Speaker 1: functions in medicine, and then I think we also talked
Speaker 1: about some pseudo scientific beliefs about blood types and personality
Speaker 1: and psychology. But I think we only briefly mentioned in
Speaker 1: the possibility of synthetic blood or using something other than
Speaker 1: 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 suspended 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 rest
Speaker 1: sting a heart rate is something like seventy beats per minute.
Speaker 1: And if you multiply all these together, you find that
Speaker 1: the heart circulates about four point nine are close to
Speaker 1: five leaders of blood every minute. So on average, it
Speaker 1: probably takes about one minute for your heart to circulate
Speaker 1: your entire blood volume. And it does this minute after
Speaker 1: minute after minute until you die. Isn't that crazy the
Speaker 1: longer you look at it. Yeah, this idea of this
Speaker 1: endless 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 that 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 rent to the animal or
Speaker 1: the 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: we're not just the blood. It's not like if you
Speaker 1: drained our blood out and put us in a jar,
Speaker 1: that's not us in the jar and an empty shell
Speaker 1: over here. Like I'm I'm reminded of of myths, for instance,
Speaker 1: that involve something like blood in other beings, like the
Speaker 1: episode we did on Tallos the Bronze automaton and the
Speaker 1: idea that he had this I core 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 eye
Speaker 1: cord to drain, now that you just kind of comes
Speaker 1: to a halt. Yeah. So indeed, like the idea of
Speaker 1: taking the blood from one person, the blood that is
Speaker 1: part of that person, in putting it into another person.
Speaker 1: You know that that that opens up the door for
Speaker 1: a lot of you know, I guess, uh, you know,
Speaker 1: metaphorical ideas about what that means. What does it mean
Speaker 1: that that person is now in me um or what
Speaker 1: orient in the when there is an injury? What does
Speaker 1: it mean that a lot of me is now like
Speaker 1: on the pavement. That sort of thing. Now, that brings
Speaker 1: us 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. H And
Speaker 1: as we detailed in last year's episode, which I think
Speaker 1: we recently reran uh 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 ahead of time and to 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 v 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 and
Speaker 1: early medicine here. Uh Sarkar points to ink and folklore
Speaker 1: depicting something arguably like blood transfusion. I've also seen it
Speaker 1: pointed out elsewhere that Odysseus temporarily resuscitates underworld shades by
Speaker 1: offering them um blood sacrifice in the Odyssey. The idea
Speaker 1: 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 looked,
Speaker 1: is to the blood of other animals, that's right, yeah,
Speaker 1: and uh and at 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 Duni
Speaker 1: and Paul Imarez in sixteen sixty seven, and it apparently
Speaker 1: was 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 Ani
Speaker 1: is actually I started looking into this a little bit deeper,
Speaker 1: and the more I looked, the weirder and weirder of 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 two 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 rounds of blood letting. This
Speaker 1: was in order quote, to assuage the excessive heat that
Speaker 1: was a result of the boy's violent fever. And in
Speaker 1: galenic theory, blood is associated with heat and excitation. This
Speaker 1: is part of the place we get the idea of
Speaker 1: being sanguine, right, you know, having an excess of blood
Speaker 1: 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. Uh,
Speaker 1: let some of the bathwater out. Now it seems a
Speaker 1: bit too cold. Right. The problem is that, yeah, he's
Speaker 1: he's appearing sluggish. That seems something is wrong with his brain.
Speaker 1: Maybe he doesn't have memories or much energy. Uh. So
Speaker 1: Denny counters this by starting a transfusion. He draws blood
Speaker 1: from the carotid artery of a lamb, and then that
Speaker 1: 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 Denny concludes, Yeah,
Speaker 1: it seems like he's doing good. Uh. And this was
Speaker 1: on June sixteen 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 talking about. Despite being on the cutting edge of
Speaker 1: seventeenth century anatomy and new surgical techniques, Denny was also
Speaker 1: still in the grip of Galenism, which had been, you know,
Speaker 1: a dominant force in European medicine since the Roman Empire,
Speaker 1: and which attributed the bulk of medical pathologies to imbalances
Speaker 1: or corruptions in the four humors. And Deny himself, he
Speaker 1: agreed with this. He believed, quote, the greatest part of
Speaker 1: our diseases are but results of the distemper and corrupt
Speaker 1: 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,
Speaker 1: quote the speediest and commonest remedy they have in practice
Speaker 1: is to evacuate the same by phlebotomy. Phlebotomy means blood letting,
Speaker 1: or else refresh it and cool it by julips. 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, we 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, Dennis 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
Speaker 1: lamb blood. To be fair, I don't know how many
Speaker 1: julips he had, but they did bleed him twenty times. Uh,
Speaker 1: maybe you got a julip every time. Who knows. It's
Speaker 1: like the brownie they give you and the when you
Speaker 1: go to donate blood, you know you get brownies. Oh man,
Speaker 1: I get um like peanut better crackers. Sometimes I get
Speaker 1: what is it that's a special tree? Oh, nutter butters
Speaker 1: sometimes there I've seen the Nutter butters. Yeah, that confirmed
Speaker 1: in my experience, Like it forces me to equate peanut
Speaker 1: butter with the blood. Like basically, you know, we're thinking
Speaker 1: about the same thing here. It's like, well I lost
Speaker 1: some blood, gotta get some peanut butter in there. That
Speaker 1: taste of the Nutter butter or the what is it's
Speaker 1: I was trying to remember the name of the little
Speaker 1: brownie that's got the colorful sprinkle on top that they
Speaker 1: give you sometimes and Seth chimed in there called cosmic brownies.
Speaker 1: We think, yeah, I've never heard of that. I mean
Speaker 1: like space brownies. I believe Seth space cakes. But I
Speaker 1: don't think you should have one of those after blood donation.
Speaker 1: You should have some space shrimp cocktail after blood donation.
Speaker 1: But anyway, okay, So, so bleedings, bleedings, all those bleedings
Speaker 1: obviously that Denny loves. They can really take a toll.
Speaker 1: As described, you know what happened to this fifteen year old.
Speaker 1: So Denise saw blood transfusion from animals as a perfect
Speaker 1: compliment to blood letting. In his words, it's quote the
Speaker 1: old and corrupt being first evacuated, could then make room
Speaker 1: for the new and pure. So in the case of
Speaker 1: the June sixteen sixty seven transfusion, this teenage boy, he's
Speaker 1: blood twenty times to bring down his fever. He's pretty
Speaker 1: low after that, and then Lamb's blood is used to
Speaker 1: revive him with a fresh, clean, non corrupted supply. But
Speaker 1: Denny did not stop there with the xeno transfusions. Later
Speaker 1: that same year, Denny also transfused sheep's blood into the
Speaker 1: 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 role,
Speaker 1: just like seeing what a transfusion does into a healthy guy.
Speaker 1: And reportedly this guy was fine. And then after that,
Speaker 1: Denny 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 Denny
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 has 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 that, 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 medically, yeah, so I
Speaker 1: don't know, but it is widely reported at the time.
Speaker 1: Everyone says he was a known madman. So without any
Speaker 1: other we just have to assume that there is something
Speaker 1: else going on with him, I guess so. Denny, of
Speaker 1: course attributed this supposed insanity to humorl imbalance. Denise solution, Well,
Speaker 1: you've got to remove this man's blood and replace it
Speaker 1: with calf's blood, and did he believed that the sweetness
Speaker 1: and freshness of the calf's blood would temper the ardor
Speaker 1: and the boiling of the man's existing blood. So Denny
Speaker 1: tries this out. They bled him of two d ninety
Speaker 1: milli leaders of his own blood, and then they put
Speaker 1: about a hundred and seventy five milli leaders of blood
Speaker 1: from 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 nosebleed, and maybe most alarmingly, uh to quote from
Speaker 1: Denise report, he produced a tall glass of urine as
Speaker 1: 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. Oh yeah, god. Uh So
Speaker 1: you would think this would suggest the transfusion was a
Speaker 1: bad idea, right, that this guy's he's experiencing chest pain,
Speaker 1: back pain, he's vomiting, his nose is bleeding, and he's
Speaker 1: peeing black. But Denny considered it a success. And the
Speaker 1: reason he considered it a success was he interpreted the
Speaker 1: results according to humorl theory. He believed that the black
Speaker 1: urine was an evacuation of excess black bile from the body,
Speaker 1: which he wrote, is known to send vapors up into
Speaker 1: the brain which disrupt its function. So, according to Deny,
Speaker 1: he had been mistaken that the problem was too much
Speaker 1: corrupted blood. Instead, the problem was too much corrupted black bile,
Speaker 1: and the transfusion had caused the body to evacuate it all.
Speaker 1: And Denny believed that his transfusion had some what succeeded
Speaker 1: in curing moroy. Oh, it's such The the history thus
Speaker 1: far is is very fascinating because you know, if you're
Speaker 1: not familiar with it, and you hear about okay, the
Speaker 1: first blood transfusion and it's going to involve a human
Speaker 1: and um and and lamb, you just assume it's going
Speaker 1: to end and just disaster and just end in death,
Speaker 1: and that that will be a stumbling block. But then
Speaker 1: it's not, or seemingly not. And then in this case,
Speaker 1: something that seems like a firm warning, um, do not proceed,
Speaker 1: rethink what you were doing, is interpreted as a success. Yeah, exactly,
Speaker 1: though not by everyone, I should note, because the paper
Speaker 1: by chin Ye and chin Yee notes that there was
Speaker 1: a rival Parisian physician named guyom Lamie who he disagreed,
Speaker 1: and he argued that the black urine was a negative
Speaker 1: reaction to the calf's blood. But the reason, he said
Speaker 1: was that it was indicative of the body's attempt to
Speaker 1: purge the contamination of a substance that was against its nature,
Speaker 1: which sounds kind of close. But I think this opposition
Speaker 1: is being infused with, you know, ideas of sort of
Speaker 1: like spiritual essential is um that are not really proper
Speaker 1: in medicine. Uh It sounds to me like Muroy was
Speaker 1: probably suffering from what is now called an acute hemolytic reaction,
Speaker 1: which is a widely known rare side effect of a
Speaker 1: blood transfusion, I guess, more common if it is not
Speaker 1: a properly controlled blood transfusion. And this is where the
Speaker 1: recipient's immune system interprets the donor red blood cells as
Speaker 1: invasive pathogens and attacks them hemolysis in in the name
Speaker 1: acute hemolytic reaction, hemallysis means the destruction of red blood cells,
Speaker 1: and then the red blood cells under attack releases substance
Speaker 1: into 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 their 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 on another transfusion. Moroy
Speaker 1: refused to cooperate and received no blood, so he was
Speaker 1: going to get a third transfusion, but it didn't go forward,
Speaker 1: and then quote he died that evening, and his wife,
Speaker 1: perhaps with the encouragement of some physician critics, accused Denny
Speaker 1: of killing her husband. Denny was tried for manslaughter but
Speaker 1: exonerated when it was discovered that Mrs Moroy was poisoning
Speaker 1: her husband with arsenic and then the following year, the
Speaker 1: French parliament enacted a ban on transfusion of blood into humans.
Speaker 1: So he tries to do this third transfusion, uh doesn't
Speaker 1: work out. Maroy dies, his wife is found to have
Speaker 1: been poisoning him, or at least is believed to have
Speaker 1: been poisoning him, and then we get a ban on
Speaker 1: on transfusions in France. But it also doesn't stop there
Speaker 1: because while you can imagine it's common enough for a
Speaker 1: person to be murdered by a spouse. The story gets
Speaker 1: even more complicated. I was reading about a book by
Speaker 1: a Vanderbilt University historian named Holly Tucker that argues the
Speaker 1: case for a conspiracy of rival physicians to intentionally murder
Speaker 1: Antoine Moroy and framed Denny for causing his death. Now,
Speaker 1: I haven't read this book that it sounds extremely interesting,
Speaker 1: but I want to give you the gist, mostly based
Speaker 1: on a review in the Journal of Clinical Investigation by
Speaker 1: Neil Blumberg. So, to start, we know that Denise gillina
Speaker 1: humor theory was hopelessly misguided. Right, this is not a
Speaker 1: good basis for medical intervention. There is no reason to
Speaker 1: think that blood from a docile lamb will treat mania
Speaker 1: and humans mental illness doesn't work that way, and there's
Speaker 1: no way to predict or prevent which of these would
Speaker 1: result in a severe, life threatening rejection of the donor blood.
Speaker 1: But despite how misguided and dangerous Denise treatments were, denise
Speaker 1: rivals opposed them for almost equally misguided reasons. A lot
Speaker 1: of these I think some were probably just sort of
Speaker 1: motivated by ambition, you know, they were kind of temporal
Speaker 1: and political rivalries but many of Denise opponents had extreme
Speaker 1: religious and conceptual opposition to blood transfusions. For example, some
Speaker 1: of them believe that the transfusion of blood from an
Speaker 1: animal could turn a human into a type of chimera
Speaker 1: or some kind of animal human hybrid. You might become
Speaker 1: a subhuman ware lamb or a ware calf, which is
Speaker 1: very Gary Larson. Yes, and some also believed that the
Speaker 1: ingestion of foreign blood through transfusion was a slippery slope
Speaker 1: to cannibalism. I'm not quite sure how you get there,
Speaker 1: but that at least was was argued. Yeah, because it's
Speaker 1: I mean, it's not like the humans we're talking about
Speaker 1: here weren't already eating meat, right, Yeah, I would think
Speaker 1: that the eating of meat would more likely give way
Speaker 1: to cannibalism than the transfusion of blood from animals. Yeah. Yeah,
Speaker 1: And this might sound kind of outlandish, like, well, how
Speaker 1: could you get to that? You know, how could you
Speaker 1: have this kind of opposition to blood transfusions? But uh,
Speaker 1: I know the cases made in Holly Tucker's book, and
Speaker 1: Bloomberg himself brings up as a point of comparison that quote.
Speaker 1: One might consider that current disagreements about stem cell therapies
Speaker 1: are similar in nature, as some find it impossible to
Speaker 1: separate considerations of religious belief and scientific approach. So even
Speaker 1: today we certainly do have, you know, bioethical debates that
Speaker 1: are largely prompted by religious belief. That's that's true. I mean,
Speaker 1: you know, I certainly think to any number of um
Speaker 1: of chimerical um uh studies that have come out, you know,
Speaker 1: there's always going to be that that voice of criticism
Speaker 1: that's going to raise the specter of some sort of
Speaker 1: uh uh you know, man goat hybrid or whatever the case.
Speaker 1: Maybe this is against nature, this is a perversion. Yeah, yeah,
Speaker 1: the shadow of Frankenstein there. At the same time, it's
Speaker 1: interesting looking at all this and thinking about like the
Speaker 1: sort of spirit that the spiritual and religious ideas that
Speaker 1: are kind of attributed to the idea of first and foremost,
Speaker 1: you know, the draining of the blood, the bleeding of
Speaker 1: the patient, 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 and 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 A Silicon
Speaker 1: Valley you might remember the the the young blood um
Speaker 1: thing being a part of the plot as the the
Speaker 1: Hoholy founder A. Gavin Belson at one point has a
Speaker 1: quote unquote blood boy who is responsible for providing him
Speaker 1: blood transfusions to UH as as a as a I
Speaker 1: believe in like a life hack to keep him on home. Man. Well,
Speaker 1: it's interesting again to compare to the case of Danny
Speaker 1: and his rivals. I mean, well, maybe I should finish
Speaker 1: it first and then say this. So in the end,
Speaker 1: Holly Tucker's book makes the argument that it was Denise opponents,
Speaker 1: especially a physician named Henri Martin de la Martiniere, who
Speaker 1: arranged the murder of the patient of Antoine Moroy by
Speaker 1: giving arsenic 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 wrong, Uh,
Speaker 1: fighting over this conceptual biomedical space. Oh wow, this is
Speaker 1: such a wonderful bit of a bit of history. I
Speaker 1: wonder if this has been adapted in any kind of
Speaker 1: historical drama, because it should 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: the strange history of of of blood, not just as
Speaker 1: zeno transfusion, but again thinking of the idea of like
Speaker 1: deer 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 rites that indeed, in
Speaker 1: eighteen fifty four, milk was injected into the veins of
Speaker 1: patients with asiatic cholera, thinking that it would help regenerate
Speaker 1: white blood stulls. Oh maybe is it like a color
Speaker 1: match thing? I know, that's what it sounds like. Now.
Speaker 1: The 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 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, and
Speaker 1: it's just portraying just the cutting edge of medicine at
Speaker 1: the time, and even you know then you see like
Speaker 1: 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
Speaker 1: blood UH sailing solutions seemed to promising UH solution for
Speaker 1: a bit there as doctors found that you could give
Speaker 1: a frog a complete transfusion of sailine and it would survive,
Speaker 1: though only for a short while. UM. However, that this
Speaker 1: is the stuff was eventually developed as a plasma volume expander.
Speaker 1: Now Sarkar does not go into detail about the beer
Speaker 1: and the urine UM tidbits, but they certainly don't highlight
Speaker 1: them as successes, so UM I assume they were not
Speaker 1: huge medical successes. Now the eighteen hundreds, hemoglobin and animal
Speaker 1: plasma seemed promising, but there were technical hurdles to isolating
Speaker 1: enough hemoglobin and animal blood um often contain toxins that
Speaker 1: were challenging to remove at the time. In eighteen eighty three,
Speaker 1: the creation of Ringer's solution. This is named for Sydney Ringer,
Speaker 1: who lived eighteen thirty five through nineteen ten. Uh this
Speaker 1: changed things a bit. Uh. So this is a solution
Speaker 1: of sodium, potassium and calcium salts that was found to
Speaker 1: restore healthy blood pressure after blood volume loss, and it's
Speaker 1: still used today as a blood volume expander. But it
Speaker 1: does not actually work as a blood substitute. Again, we
Speaker 1: have to think of all the things that that blood does,
Speaker 1: and this particular solution it doesn't, for instance, do anything
Speaker 1: that 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, B O
Speaker 1: blood 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 substitutes 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 land Strider. 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
Speaker 1: blood we could at is get in there for a
Speaker 1: little bit to stabilize the patient until actual blood can
Speaker 1: be made available. Star Car writes that while there was
Speaker 1: renewed interest during the AIDS epidemic and during Vietnam, for
Speaker 1: the 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. Uh, it would
Speaker 1: be nice if it just took care of all humans
Speaker 1: and you didn't have to to deal with type. On
Speaker 1: top of that, it needs to be able to transport
Speaker 1: oxygen throughout the body, and it needs to offer more
Speaker 1: robust shelf stability, such as lasting a year rather than
Speaker 1: a mere month as with donor blood. As such, there
Speaker 1: are basically two major areas of research under way. First
Speaker 1: of all, per floral carbons. These are inexpensive. They're devoid
Speaker 1: of biological materials that could spread infection. However, they're not
Speaker 1: water soluble and they carry much less oxygen compared to
Speaker 1: hemoglobin based products. Second, you have hemoglobin based products, so
Speaker 1: these are oxygen containing. They're involved in oxygen transport with
Speaker 1: our own red blood cells. So it's a great place
Speaker 1: to start. Now. The downside to this direction is that
Speaker 1: raw hemoglobin would break down into toxic compounds, and there
Speaker 1: are solutions stability issues as well. Quote The challenge and
Speaker 1: creating a hemoglobin based artificial blood is to modify the
Speaker 1: hemoglobin molecule. So these problems are resolved, so you could
Speaker 1: depend on either isolated hemoglobin or synthetically produced hemoglobin. If
Speaker 1: it's isolated, the product is actually made from human blood,
Speaker 1: typically blood for transfusions that has already expired. Animal blood
Speaker 1: is another option apparently, but in this case the hemoglobin
Speaker 1: 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 holds. 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,
Speaker 1: obviously the way I do, I do think it is
Speaker 1: important to you know, distress that it would be great
Speaker 1: if there was if we were to develop a pure,
Speaker 1: you know, blood substitute that, even if it only worked
Speaker 1: for a short time, could be kept on hand. You know,
Speaker 1: that's something that that was universal, something with with a
Speaker 1: decent shelf life. Uh, you know, even if it wasn't
Speaker 1: a permanent solution, if it wasn't quite as good as
Speaker 1: human blood, if it could just serve as a as
Speaker 1: as a patch, you know, until a proper blood transfusion
Speaker 1: can take place, that would be instantly helpful. Totally. Should
Speaker 1: we take a break and then come back to talk
Speaker 1: a little more, Yes, thank alright, we're back. So I
Speaker 1: was looking around for for more recent work. I was
Speaker 1: looking at a two thousand seventeen study by Waging at
Speaker 1: all published in Biomacromolecules, and they point out that hemoglobin
Speaker 1: on its own, like we discussed this toxic, but that
Speaker 1: a chemically modified version forms um methemoglobin which doesn't bind oxygen. Uh.
Speaker 1: This decreases the oxygen in the blood and the generation
Speaker 1: of methemoglobin produces cell damaging hydrogen peroxide. So the researchers
Speaker 1: in this case looked into packaging hemoglobin in a quote
Speaker 1: unquote benign envelope in this case um polydopamine or PA,
Speaker 1: which was already understudy for biomedical applications. Their findings showed
Speaker 1: promise with the package delivering oxygen while preventing the formation
Speaker 1: of meth methemoglobin and hydrogen perox side, and it's resulted
Speaker 1: in minimal cell damage. I mean, you can see pretty
Speaker 1: easily why you wouldn't really want too much hydrogen peroxides
Speaker 1: in your blood right now on the zeno transfusion front. Uh,
Speaker 1: this is 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 prc A. Now,
Speaker 1: this is a type of anemia that impacts the patient's
Speaker 1: ability to produce red, but not white blood cells. So
Speaker 1: blood transfusions are an important form of treatment. But the
Speaker 1: individual in question turned down these transfusions for religious reasons.
Speaker 1: And I believe the stems with the Jehovah's witness faith
Speaker 1: as an interpretation of abstaining from blood in the Bible.
Speaker 1: I think this is from Leviticus. Yeah, there are multiple
Speaker 1: passages cited by the Jehovah's witnesses. I think the most
Speaker 1: common one is this one in Leviticus chapter seventeen, where
Speaker 1: it says, Uh, for the life of the flesh is
Speaker 1: in the blood, and I have given it to you
Speaker 1: upon the altar to make atonement for your souls. For
Speaker 1: it is the blood that makes the atonement for the soul. Uh.
Speaker 1: And he says, therefore, to the children of Israel, you
Speaker 1: shall not eat blood. And this and some other passages
Speaker 1: are sort of interpreted in a in a way to say, well,
Speaker 1: to be safe in following this, you probably shouldn't receive
Speaker 1: blood transfusions either. But I was actually this is this
Speaker 1: is interesting there's a whole Wikipedia page on the Jehovah's
Speaker 1: Witnesses and blood transfusions that has this gigantic list of
Speaker 1: what types of procedures are allowed and what are not
Speaker 1: allowed according to Church doctrine. Because there are there's not
Speaker 1: just one type of blood transfusion. They are all kinds
Speaker 1: of blood related products that you can have put into
Speaker 1: your body, and so there are some that they accept
Speaker 1: and some they don't. In this case, however, it seems
Speaker 1: like it was it was pretty much a don't on
Speaker 1: the idea of more human blood being put into the
Speaker 1: patient for this treatment. But in this case the physicians
Speaker 1: used a quote bovine hemoglobin based oxygen carrier quote. The
Speaker 1: patient received more than twenty units of HBOC two oh
Speaker 1: one and was showing early signs of red blood cell
Speaker 1: count recovery. Although the patient did not survive, administration of
Speaker 1: the HBOC two oh one did sustain her long enough
Speaker 1: to allow for administration of immunosuppressive therapy, which ultimately improved erythropoesis. Thus,
Speaker 1: administration of alternative hemoglobin based oxygen carriers in the setting
Speaker 1: of red cell at plasia associated with thy momus warrants
Speaker 1: further investigation. And that's interesting. So this is a product
Speaker 1: that is derived from the hemoglobin, the the oxygen carrying
Speaker 1: protein that would be found in the red blood cells
Speaker 1: originally of cows or some of their bovine And uh, yeah,
Speaker 1: And I think this is in line with a lot
Speaker 1: of the stuff I was seeing about Jehovah's witnesses beliefs
Speaker 1: that um often that they will receive certain types of products,
Speaker 1: but the objection more often is to whole blood. Now,
Speaker 1: leaving medical research and uh and religious beliefs, maybe we
Speaker 1: should come back to our vampire introduction, because I think
Speaker 1: you were hypothesizing that, uh, vampires might might find themselves
Speaker 1: rather picky over what types of synthetic blood are are
Speaker 1: tasty or or go well with their I don't know,
Speaker 1: what would it be the digestive system, what system receives
Speaker 1: the blood vampire? Well, I guess that's the tricky thing
Speaker 1: about vampires, right, is that there, of course creatures of
Speaker 1: fantasy and interpretations of their their blood drinking. It's going
Speaker 1: to range from the biological, the biologically grounded, to the
Speaker 1: utterly magical. So what like, what is the nature of
Speaker 1: the blood that the vampire is drinking. Are they drinking
Speaker 1: like the magical life force of a being, you know,
Speaker 1: the splendid eye core of the Sons of Adam? Or
Speaker 1: is it like actual blood? Are they an actual sangovore
Speaker 1: much like a vampire bat. And obviously, depending on what
Speaker 1: your answer is going to be, you know, entirely different,
Speaker 1: and certainly you could have You can imagine a situation
Speaker 1: where you have a synthetic blood that is certainly helpful
Speaker 1: treating individuals who who who need it, but he is
Speaker 1: going to be kind of useless or at least not
Speaker 1: all that desired by blood drinking supernatural beings. But I thought,
Speaker 1: you know, what's what's the one thing we can definitely do.
Speaker 1: We can definitely look to the vampire bats. We can
Speaker 1: look at blood drinking in the natural world and see
Speaker 1: if there's anything out there that at all relates to
Speaker 1: this question. So I was looking at Wanted Blood for
Speaker 1: vampire Bats by Lynn Laws, writing for the Iowa State
Speaker 1: University College of Agricultural and Life Sciences. So, vampire bats,
Speaker 1: we've discussed in the show before, typically feed on fresh
Speaker 1: cow blood and only rarely bite humans. Typically for captive
Speaker 1: vampire bats, and like a laboratory or a zoo environment
Speaker 1: or some sort of enclosure. Cow blood does the trick um,
Speaker 1: but zoo conditions, especially, an anticoagulant is added to the
Speaker 1: blood to keep it fresh enough for feeding via little
Speaker 1: peachree dishes that are placed out in the enclosure. Oh
Speaker 1: I see, So like if you don't add an anticoagulant,
Speaker 1: you could have the same problem you get where you
Speaker 1: leave the soup out and it forms the skin. Yeah.
Speaker 1: One imagines, yeah, that you need to keep you want
Speaker 1: the blood. Obviously, vampire bats are not going to go
Speaker 1: around in their natural environment drinking blood out of little puddles. Uh,
Speaker 1: you know, so you need to keep it fresh. You
Speaker 1: need something to fresh it up. An anticoagulant seems to
Speaker 1: do the trick. There apparently have also been experiments with
Speaker 1: freezing the blood, and there's hope that we could eventually
Speaker 1: create a dried powder that could be reconstituted at zoos
Speaker 1: for the bats. So you add water to it and
Speaker 1: you got blood. You know, sort of like a kool
Speaker 1: aid powder, but for blood drinkers. Oh yeah, um, this
Speaker 1: brings me back. I think there's a part in Giermo
Speaker 1: del Toro's Blade to where like Russian vampires are like
Speaker 1: snorting lines of of like crystallized blood or something or something.
Speaker 1: You know, it's supposed to be crystallized blood. Um. So,
Speaker 1: I don't know, maybe they ran across the same sort
Speaker 1: of research when they were putting together to that film.
Speaker 1: That's funny. Would it be different snorted than it would
Speaker 1: be just drank um? Well, I don't know. I mean,
Speaker 1: it doesn't really, it doesn't make a lot of sense
Speaker 1: that the psychological difference. Yeah, I don't know. You get
Speaker 1: the idea. It's like a vampires, they just like blood.
Speaker 1: They'll take it anyway they can get it. They'll drink it,
Speaker 1: they'll snort it up their nose, they'll freak a bath
Speaker 1: in it. Yeah, repaste the blood, smoke the blood. Um. Uh.
Speaker 1: You know, well whatever serves as a useful metaphor for
Speaker 1: you know, for us to use in creating a vampire,
Speaker 1: like the vampire, as addict the vampire, as as you know,
Speaker 1: a moral themed et cetera. Now, going back to what
Speaker 1: we're discussing though, in the possibilities for for synthetic blood,
Speaker 1: if you end up with a blood substitute it is
Speaker 1: actually made from human blood, you know, that's that's depending
Speaker 1: on the hemoglobin. Uh. That would be an interesting scenario, right,
Speaker 1: because you could potentially have fake blood for the vampires
Speaker 1: to keep the vampires at bay that is actually made
Speaker 1: from human blood, but maybe is like you know, it
Speaker 1: is the the result of of blood bank blood that
Speaker 1: has not been fully utilized. So the vampires might not
Speaker 1: be really all that happy about it. But maybe you know,
Speaker 1: you wouldn't behave be having to just bleed yourself dry
Speaker 1: for the vampires. You would. You would have like a
Speaker 1: secondary product that makes them mostly happy. Yeah, they'd be
Speaker 1: helping us deal with medical waste. Yeah, so that would
Speaker 1: that seems kind of like a very very much a
Speaker 1: reduced stature for something like Count Dracula. You know, it's like,
Speaker 1: I know you want to be the lord of the
Speaker 1: night and you know, drink our blood and have a
Speaker 1: serve you. But what if you just gobbled up our
Speaker 1: medical waste? Are you on board? Yes? All right on that.
Speaker 1: We're gonna go ahead and close it out here. We're
Speaker 1: gonna remind everybody that if you want to support the show,
Speaker 1: of great thing to do is to rate, review and subscribe.
Speaker 1: If you want to go to stuff to blow your mind,
Speaker 1: dot com. You'll go to our iHeart page. There'll be
Speaker 1: a taverns and merchandise. You can go to our t
Speaker 1: shirt shop and check out some cool designs there. That's
Speaker 1: another way you can support the show. Buy a shirt
Speaker 1: with a monster on Huge. Thanks, as always to our
Speaker 1: excellent audio producer Seth Nicholas Johnson. If you would like
Speaker 1: to get in touch with us with feedback on this
Speaker 1: episode or any other, to suggest topic for the future,
Speaker 1: just to say hello, you can email us at contact.
Speaker 1: That's Stuff to Blow your Mind dot com Stuff to
Speaker 1: Blow Your Mind's production of I Heart Radio. For more podcasts.
Speaker 1: For My Heart Radio, visit the iHeart Radio app, Apple Podcasts,
Speaker 1: or wherever you're listening to your favorite shows. This was
Speaker 1: gretudud prop