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."

Comments

This should make vampires happy!

[WolphFang]

This should make vampires happy!

Re:This should make vampires happy!

[Chris Tucker]

Dear Pathetic Concern Troll:

Sorry about your butthurt.

I suppose I should be sorry to tell you this, but America's founders were Deists, Unitarians, Atheists and Freemasons.

Scarcely the creme of "christianity".

Oh, also. Most Americans have no beef about using embryos for research that will help humanity. The research IS being done, despite your butthurt, in Europe and Asia, where christian lunatics have no say in the matter.

So, here's the deal. People like you are dying out. Every generation more and more people reject your 'religion'. Your book of the collected myths, fables and superstitions of bronze age nomadic desert herders and the death cults they belonged to, is ignored and rejected.

Sucks to be you.

For the rest of us, not so much.

kthnxbai!

Re:This should make vampires happy!

[x2A]

We don't really need to do anything. Our survival stems from our evolved ability to correctly attribute cause to effect, and therefore be able to control effects by controlling causes. As soon as you remove this ability (by claiming simply that the cause is "god dun it") you remove the ability to control reality, which means removing the ability of self preservation. This is why countries where religion isn't rampant are able to run themselves in a more sustained way, right across the board, you'll tend to find fewer boom/bust cycles, fewer wars, fewer enemies, more renewable energy sources. This is because you can't expect somebody to be irrational only when it comes to their religion; their ability to believe things without reason infects their entire decision making process, as does the ability to escape personal responsibility (submitting to "god's will" rather than exercising ones own will to solve problems).

Re:This should make vampires happy!

[mr_mischief]

You should probably be aware that not all Christians are Catholics. There are plenty of Christians who believe in birth control (including many Catholics who disagree with their church over it).

Most of them don't believe in abortion as a convenient form of birth control, though. Contraception is much easier, safer, and cheaper for the mother than abortion, even if you do think abortion is grand.

Personally, I'm against abortion in principle unless it's an unusually dangerous pregnancy for the mother or the result of rape or incest. However, I know that making it illegal wouldn't stop it. It'd just drive it underground and make everybody involved -- mothers, fathers, doctors and nurses performing -- worse off. I think it should be, as President Clinton said, "legal, safe, and rare".

Now, about the difference between IVF and abortion... IVF is not abortion. The embryos from IVF used for ECS research have not been implanted then scraped out by a surgeon. They are the spare embryos that were never implanted in the uterus. These are left over from women and couples trying to get pregnant and have kids, not preventing it. It's not about birth control in the common sense of the phrase, which is preventing births.

Your argument seems to confuse quite a few topics. You also generalize quite a few groups into one you clearly disagree with the most. In your quest to vilify people as simpletons who don't grasp the issues at hand, you have oversimplified the topics and (probably intentionally) failed to even acknowledge the issues at hand are much more complex than you mention.

Re:This should make vampires happy!

[couchslug]

Most US Christians are either OF the religious right, or more importantly will never oppose it.

The few on Slashdot aren't representative. The MANY who just voted the Teapublicans into power ARE representative, and just proved it yet again.

Re:This should make vampires happy!

[PsychoSlashDot]

Personally, I'm against abortion in principle unless it's an unusually dangerous pregnancy for the mother or the result of rape or incest.

How about in the case of a 15-year-old girl whose Christian parents who wouldn't talk about sex at all with her for fear that her hearing about it would encourage her to do it? So the girl doesn't know the fundamentals and trusts her new boyfriend who insists "condoms don't feel good" and "I'll pull out".

What I'm asking is: how do you feel about unwanted and highly personally destructive pregnancies ultimately enabled by ignorance due to religion?

Re:This should make vampires happy!

[drsmithy]

Most of them don't believe in abortion as a convenient form of birth control, though.

I've never met anyone who thinks abortion is a convenient form of birth control, including women who have had several of them.

Contraception is much easier, safer, and cheaper for the mother than abortion, even if you do think abortion is grand.

It's also far from perfect.

Personally, I'm against abortion in principle unless it's an unusually dangerous pregnancy for the mother or the result of rape or incest.
[...]

Now, about the difference between IVF and abortion... IVF is not abortion.

I am fascinated to hear how you've managed to justify that little mental disconnect to yourself. What's the moral difference between creating an embryo in a test tube and then destroying it, and creating an embryo in a uterus and then destroying it ? By what measure can destroying an embryo that was almost certainly an accident be considered a greater crime than deliberately creating dozens (if not hundreds) of them with the absolute foreknowledge they would nearly all be destroyed (ie: creating them to destroy them) ?

Re:This should make vampires happy!

[Dog-Cow]

What kind of woman has several abortions without it being a (convenient) form of birth control?

Another Nail...

[sycodon]

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.

Re:Another Nail...

[WolphFang]

Indeed. Now just to get the MEDIA to stop mixing them up. :(

Re:Another Nail...

[hedwards]

Even if it is a replacement, we're still years behind where we would be if the hicks didn't insist that we throw out the unused embryos. The reality is that we've got plenty of embryonic stem cells available without creating any more. Which really ought to be where the morals come into it. As it stands we're destroying the extra stem cells from IVF instead of using them because the right won't allow scientists to use them.

Re:Another Nail...

[c6gunner]

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.

With the advent of the high-speed train, the automobile has had yet another nail pounded into it's coffin. Of course, people will still continue to buy them as some sort of political statement.

See how stupid you sound?

Re:Another Nail...

[FatdogHaiku]

Even if it is a replacement, we're still years behind where we would be if the hicks didn't insist that we throw out the unused embryos. The reality is that we've got plenty of embryonic stem cells available without creating any more. Which really ought to be where the morals come into it. As it stands we're destroying the extra stem cells from IVF instead of using them because the right won't allow scientists to use them.

Yes, because research is only done in the USA, no one else has the will or facilities to do any experiments.

Re:Another Nail...

[Anonymous Coward]

For example, the paths of research that produced this discovery in the article are further along precisely because embryonic research has met with ethical concerns.

Dude, imagine if we decided that skin was sacred and stopped this treatment on arbitrary ethical concerns. Then there would be OTHER areas of medical technology that would be further along! But what if we decided they were unethical too?! Think of all the cool shit that could be researched! Far out, man!

Re:Another Nail...

[JTsyo]

Umm if you follow the Bible, God was willing to personally kill everything on the earth save a handful of people and animals. I don't see why a few billion embryos would be a issue for him, since he's not actively killing them but just allowing a natural process. If you want to place blame on him for his design then I think that opens up much bigger list of issues in human design.

Re:How much blood can "a patch of skin" provide?

[ColdWetDog]

No, no, no. No even wrong. However, the idiot FA is so devoid of information that yours is a reasonable assumption. A better intro.

Useless note to Slashdot editors: Stay away from University PR Blurbs. A bigger waste of electrons than Fox News.

Fucking PR

[oldhack]

When scientist act like ad execs, can you blame the Kansans?

Many questions still...

[hahn]

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?