Healthcare systems depend on blood donations, which are harmless for the donors because humans usually just reproduce blood and can repeat the process over and over. What about blood is so special that we can’t manufacture it in a lab or replace is with artificial blood?
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Producing artificial blood is like trying to maintain a garden with no workers.
Sure you can have all the ” ingredients”, water, seeds, fences etc. but some of those are living and others need upkeep or replacing.
You can’t just dump them all in a pile and expect it to work.
Blood needs numerous organs (workers) to maintain itself that can’t easily be reproduced artificially.
It needs to be kept clean (kidneys, spleen) kept sterile (the immune system) and requires a careful balance of chemicals to stay viable (brain, liver, glands etc.).
You can’t really reproduce this in the lab very easily.
So there’s probably two main ways to attempt it:
1. Make the components separately and mix them together when needed
2. Produce the tissues needed in the lab and kind of create a pseudo human body with only the essentials for blood production and maintenance
Evidently neither of these are simple tasks.
So in our analogy you would need to either assemble all the parts of a garden separately then put them all together perfectly in one go or replace the workers with complex drones.
It’s not impossible but it’s not straightforward. Hopefully it will be cracked in the next decade but who knows.
It’s worth reading into in more detail rather than an ELI5 if you are interested because it is fascinating.
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