Everything has a chemical compound, I just don’t get why it would be impossible to make real blood at home using chemicals.
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Blood is actually very complex. Though most of it is water, the rest contains things like cells and proteins that we don’t fully understand well enough to be able to create them from scratch chemicals.
Because blood is not just simple chemicals.
Blood has 4 main components, Red blood cells, white blood cells, platelets, and plasma.
Red Blood cells are the cells that move oxygen around the body, and they are full blow, complex cells, not simple chemical compounds.
White blood cells are the cells of your immune system that fight off infections, again, they’re foul blow complex cells with DNA and proteins and organelles etc etc.
Now platelets are much much simple and much smaller, they’re essentially little protein bundles that for blood clots to stop bleeding. Maybe you could generate these synthetically, but it’s probably be difficult.
Now plasma, plasma is the one that you might be able to generate at home. Plasma is essentially just “everything else” in the blood. Plasma is 92% water, and then 8% other sugars, fats, proteins, and nutrients floating around in the water.
Getting all those individual things might be a pain, but if you just needed to raise blood pressure/rehydrate a person, you could use saline (salt water) to replace plasma for the most part.
There have been plenty of attempts, even some that were medically approved, but they all had significant enough side effects and/or issues with production and storage that none are currently in use today. There are still ongoing attempts. Wikipedia has a good summary:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Blood_substitute
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In theory your blood is a mixture of chemical compounds, but they are not all simple compounds like water or gasoline etc.
You blood contains a very large number of different things.
Among the most important parts of that are your red blood cells that carry oxygen though your body. You need all the stuff in your blood to survive, but the lack of oxygen will kill you the quickest.
Of course human cells too are just an arrangement of atoms into molecules and molecules into large structures.
A water molecule has three atoms 2 hydrogen and one oxygen.
There are trillions of atoms making up millions of molecules that make up a human cell. (Google gives 300 Trillion atoms and 42 million molecules for an average human cell).
You can’t easily synthesize that.
You can make human blood cells if you use human bone marrow, that is how your body does it.
Unfortunately you can’t just use anyone’s bone marrow to make blood cells.
Your body has an immune system that is very good at destroying things that don’t belong inside your body, that includes foreign red blood cells.
You need blood cells that are either your own or close enough to your own to fool your immune system to get away with it.
This is non-trivial.
People are working on it, but right now the easiest way to get blood that will work in your veins is to let your own body make it.
And as sattes above most of that is just to get blood that carries oxygen. You blood serves many other functions too and carries a ton of other stuff. You can live without those for a little while, but you die very quickly without oxygen. However to completely replace blood long term with a synthetic alternative you would need to take over all functions, this would be hard because there are so many things and we can’t be sure we know them all. evolution does not simply create one thing for one function but usually makes anything serve as many functions as possible and we only ever figure out that something was had a secondary or tertiary function when it goes wrong.
Because blood isn’t just “chemicals.” Blood is mostly water which you can certainly get at home, but there are also red blood cells, white blood cells, and platelets. How exactly would you make actual living cells at home with some household chemicals?
It’s all chemicals, yes. But synthesizing that all from scratch is way, way beyond us, because many of those chemicals are very complex and there’s loads of them in total. Even “just” making synthetic plasma with all its component substances is an insane feat of biochemical engineering, let alone making the cells. That’s *creating life!* Add to that that our understanding of what exactly those chemicals & cells are/do is far from complete, and the overall goal of making real blood from non-biological sources is the stuff of sci fi.
People are talking about the complexity of blood and they aren’t wrong. However, there is another factor I don’t see mentioned. LIFE. We as of yet have no idea how to impart life into anything. We can take living things and multiply them. Recently we’ve figured out how to take living things and recode them to behave differently then they otherwise would. However, we still don’t know how to take a pile of chemicals and make them come alive. Blood has living cells in it, and to make living cells we need living cells.
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