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#True blood drink full#

That means they'll need stem cell donors as well as, later on, transfusion recipients, and neither of those come free.Ĭlinical trials for any foreign substance like synthetic blood also need to be performed on 'pharmaceutically naïve' subjects: people whose bodies aren't already full of drugs. Testing Tru BloodĪccording to its statements in The Scotsman, the Scottish Centre for Regenerative Medicine will produce synthetic blood for the trials using induced pluripotent stem cells – adult cells that can be forced to act like embryotic stem cells. The two major quagmires, she told Wired, lie in how clinical trials for synthetic blood are conducted and in the potential patenting of the technology. Though her research focuses specifically on the politics of paying clinical egg donors in California, the patterns of structural inequality she outlines are in danger of repeating themselves in Scotland – and later, in the rest of the world.

#True blood drink license#

Oh, also? The license permits blood manufacturing 'on an industrial scale.' Cue the True Blood overture (albeit sans vampires).Īnd according to Ruha Benjamin, a sociologist at Boston University, the arrival of synthetic blood is also likely to come with some serious socioeconomic and ethical issues, including ones that have complicated many medical advances before it.īenjamin is the author of People's Science: Bodies and Rights on the Stem Cell Frontier, a new book that explores the social forces that inform and arise from scientific research, especially controversial medical practices like stem cell trials. After years of partial synthetic successes at best, it will permit the first-ever human clinical trials of synthetic blood. The license allows the researchers to use already-recognized stem cell technology to create a compound that would both eliminate the risk of infusion-transmitted infections and supplement (if not eventually take the place of) chronically limited blood banks worldwide. After decades of global research, controversies, and failed approval petitions, the UK's Medical and Healthcare products Regulatory Agency finally gave researchers at the Scottish Centre for Regenerative Medicine the go-ahead late last month to start developing synthetic blood with adult stem cells. Season 6 of HBO's vampire drama True Blood premieres on Sunday night, presumably following up on last year's cliffhanger where the factory that produces Tru-Blood - the bottled synthetic blood that allows vampires go 'vegetarian' - was burned to the ground, destroying the product that made it possible for vampires to non-violently co-exist with people.īut out here in the real world, the future of synthetic blood is just beginning.