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Scientists Turn Skin Into Blood
Breakthru writes "In an important breakthrough, scientists at McMaster University have discovered how to make human blood from adult human skin. The discovery, published in the prestigious science journal Nature today, could mean that in the foreseeable future people needing blood for surgery, cancer treatment or treatment of other blood conditions like anemia will be able to have blood created from a patch of their own skin to provide transfusions. Clinical trials could begin as soon as 2012."
This should make vampires happy!
leather-dog muksihs
Blog: @muksihs
In an important breakthrough, scientists at McMaster University have discovered how to make human blood from adult human skin.
So not only will it clot, it can tan?
When our name is on the back of your car, we're behind you all the way!
That whole "walking around with no skin" situation could be a bit of a problem.
The article mentioned that it's a direct conversion from skin to blood... but I think a reasonable patch of skin wouldn't have enough volume of cells for a blood transfusion?
Embryonic Stem Cell Research has yet another nail pounded into its coffin.
Of course people will still support it as some kind of political statement.
When Fascism comes to America, it will call itself Anti-Fascism, and tell you to give up your guns.
Seems to me they invented the reverse of the process that's really needed. It's a lot harder to get enough skin for grafting than it is to get blood for transfusions. Wouldn't blood-to-skin be a better conversion?
In theory, practice and theory are the same. In practice, they're not.
Aha...,
down side, FACE OFF!!
So they'll be able to grind up people and use them for blood transfusions, right?
As fascinating as it is scientifically, we've got blood transfusions more or less figured out. I'm curious if they'll figure out how to do the reverse, blood to skin. Right now, skin grafts are a rather painful processes, and it's hard to get enough skin for them. Going the other way seems like it would be much more useful.
But how much skin would it take? Transfusions are usually a couple litres, right? That's a lot of skin.
Now if we can just get the Crips to turn into bloods we may actually have something useful.
______ Eagles may fly but monkeys don't get sucked into jet engines.
When scientist act like ad execs, can you blame the Kansans?
Fuck systemd. Fuck Redhat. Fuck Soylent, too. Wait, scratch the last one.
Any kid with a skateboard knows how to do that...
Nasty mental picture, though. Good idea for a zombie movie. "A virus that turns skin... into BLOOOD! What could go wrong?"
It's supposed to be completely automatic, but actually you have to press this button.
A little too late for Halloween 2010. Just imagine the party gags!
While this is an interesting discovery, scientific history is littered with interesting discoveries that led nowhere. The practicality is dubious until we find answers to quite a few questions. Like how much skin it takes to produce a half liter of blood. A half liter is the standard volume of one bag of packed red blood cells (RBC). To be precise - 450 ml. If you need the entire skin to produce that much, then it's not exactly practical. And if you can grow an RBC supply from just a little bit of skin, how much time will it take and how much money in resources to develop AND store an adequate quantity? And will doing so compromise the stability or functionality (O2 carrying capabilities) of the RBC's produced by such a method?
"The only normal people are the ones you don't know very well."
I suppose they add some things, but surely the process must roughly obey conservation of mass.. How much skin would I loose for a transfusion bag of blood? The thought gave me the chills. (yes yes, I know, between my life and my skin I would of course choose my life).
Ah, I guess the moyle's cat is out of luck!
Cut off a patch of skin. Yeah, that'll stop the bleeding!
turn it into some sort of laser or a gas filled grenade and this would make for 1 brutal video game weapon.
Doctor: "Good news! We've managed to turn all your skin into blood! Now, there is also some slightly bad news..."
That was my first thought too, but I was thinking of burn units. The reverse trick of turning blood into skin would be a godsend.
Weaselmancer
rediculous.
Soylent Green is people!
The goal was/is not to make bags of liquid blood for transfusions, it's to reconstitute the entire blood hierarchy (including red blood cells and the immune system) by injecting a few stem/progenitor cells. The idea here is that if you've got mutations that predispose you to getting leukemia or such, we'll be able to take some skin cells, grow those cells in vitro and fix the mutations, then turn them into "normal" blood stem/progenitors that we can inject into you after we've irradiated/killed your (mutant/leukemic) bone marrow. In mice, we can reconstitute lethally-irradiated individuals with single hematopoietic stem cells. Humans are bigger and might need more than one cell, but ethics boards won't let us do those experiments (it's hard to be sure you're getting single cells, so limiting dilution assays end up killing half your mice).
Its been done. Ever heard of a skateboard?
Have gnu, will travel.
There is already a not in the interest of the child push to persuade parents to allow circumcisions to gather skin for burn victims and the lucrative cosmetics trade, this will only add to the pressure to gather more. Infant skin is preferred because more can be grown from a sample because of the limit on how many times a non-cancerous human cell can divide.
Cut off a patch of skin. Yeah, that'll stop the bleeding!
This is a wonderful experiment if you add cutty emos to the mix
This certainly gives a new meaning to "no skin off my nose!"
There is no mention that this University is Canadian. Come on guys. Canadian power!
On with weaponization!
Doesn't this remind you of the scene in the Raiders movie, when the Nazi's skin turns liquid? Is this how they did that scene?
Who would win this election: Andrew Weiner vs Andrew Weiner's weiner.
The scientist obviously got their inspiration from this double feature: http://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/en/b/be/I_Drink_Your_Blood_I_Eat_Your_Skin.jpg
Schroedinger's Brexit: The UK is both in and out of the EU at the same time!
How long does it take? Could it be used to turn the state enemies into nothing but blood and guts(and bones) in a matter of minutes? Maybe I shouldn't give the gov this idea :S
I was thinking the same thing. But, that is easy; Just a bunch of hcl will do that trick.
I prefer the "u" in honour as it seems to be missing these days.
Everyday technological breakthroughs are like normal news, but when some medical discoveries emerge, it never fails to amaze me! I'm a technical person after all.
But wait what would be the blood type of these things? Type 'S'? =)
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If not, it ought to be!
>will be able to have blood created from a patch of their own skin
I guess it really depends on how much you can make from a small patch of skin, as I think it is based on the piece of skin size that will determine this. As much as I might want to get some skin turned into blood to save my life, what sort of life are you going to have if you had to use up your whole backside to get your blood, and what would you replace the skin with on your backside, you would not leave it
showing the muscle tissue underneath....
Is it me, or does "turn skin into blood" sound like a particularly nasty curse out of the Harry Potter series?
I was able to turn quite a lot of skin into quite a lot of blood, with nothing more complicated than a length of aerial cable and a Peugeot Boxer van. Feed aerial cable down through the roof, slide hand between headlining and door frame to retrieve cable, and voila! Lots of blood and no skin on the back of your hand!
It's fuck-space-exploration-now-make-me-live-longer AC, either one of Slashdot's most horrible posters or most elite trolls :-(
"When information is power, privacy is freedom" - Jah-Wren Ryel
Anyone else envisioning a ray gun that turns people's skin to blood and they collapse in a bloody mess on the ground?
"If I had a hammer..."
"Flyin' in just a sweet place,
Never been known to fail..."
Personally, I'm against abortion in principle unless it's an unusually dangerous pregnancy for the mother or the result of rape or incest.
Why is a child produced through rape or incest any less deserving of life than one who was not?
To me, THIS is what makes pro-lifers such hypocrites. "Oh yeah, we're 100% against the *murder of precious babies*, except sometimes not."
With the first link, the chain is forged.
This reminds me of the Voyager's Doctor's ethical dillema of whether to use research of murderers. The question was left sort of unanswered by the end of the episode, as the Doctor used the research to save a life, but was distressed by that fact.
Perhaps it was inappropriate to make an analogy with fiction when talking about destructive research on human beings...
This weapon will be awesome! Plane flies over the battlefield and drop the weapon. The weapon explodes and sprays the enemy territory. The aggressors walk in not with weapons, but mops and mop up the blood of what was people. This will make conquering the world so much easier.
"The laws of science be a harsh mistress." --Bender
The restrictions which have existed (until Obama overturned them) regard limiting federally funded research to certain pre-existent lines.
If "federally funded" includes "done in a facility which has built part of its infrastructure or is supporting part of its common infrastructure with federal funding", and essentially all organizations capable of doing the work and making the results available publicly (such as university medical centers) meet that definition, how is that different from a federal ban?
Bantam Dominique roosters crow a four-note song. Once you've heard it as "Happy BIRTHday" you can't NOT hear it that way
They laughed at me then, but now that I have my SKIN TO BLOOD RAYGUN, we'll see who gets the last laugh!
Now available in handy raygun form!
They said my skin banks were madness! But now I control the entire vampire economy!
Aw shucks, I can do this already! Just gimmee a shotgun an' a box of staples...
who see this as a potential for a nasty weapon? If it involves some type of energy ray, or simply a chemical compound (which the article DID say that the scientists are trying to improve upon, but did not specify how it's done), then I'm sure it could be made into a weapon. Just imagine the possibilities...