Can blood be artificially made?

Question

Can blood be artificially made?

Answer 1

http://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/200...

Answer 2

In theory? Yes. Anything that can or does exist can be made, in theory.

In practice? Not likely. Blood cells, for example, are terrifically complicated organic nanomachines - we have trouble enough building simple cantilever beams out of silicon at that scale, reverse-engineering biological organisms is right out.

There are a few blood substitutes in existence - ranging from D5W (a sugar called dextrose dissolved at 5% concentration in water) to various patented compounds which can carry some oxygen as well as replace volume (the ScienceDaily article linked above describes one) - but none of them handle all the functions of ordinary blood.

Answer 3

It was just anounced this week that a method to produce large quantites of type O neg blood from stem cells has been developed. Here's the link to a news article:

http://www.timesonline.co.uk/tol/life_an...