…But What Will The Vampires Think?
By Justin Gardner | Related entries in Science
This is blood, but better. It can carry 100 times the oxygen to your body then the regular stuff.
From Pop Sci:
…snow-white, completely synthetic substance made from perfluorocarbons, or PFCs, a compound whose chemical makeup closely resembles the nonstick Teflon in your frying pan. PFCs have the highest gas-dissolving capacity of any liquid and, when used with supplemental oxygen, allow blood to carry many times more oxygen than it normally does (and to carry more oxygen faster and more easily than hemoglobin-based substitutes). [...](Jason) Highsmith clicks to a picture of an injured human spinal cord, and it looks as if the once-thriving forest of veins has been clear-cut. He assumes that the rats that received PFCs in his study maintained a healthy grove of veins even after injury, since the oxygen levels in their spinal cords were six times as high as in the rodents that didn’t get Oxycyte. “It’s like a miracle drug,â€Â? he says. “Like pouring oxygen over the tissues.â€Â?
And one of the best things…this fake blood could significantly help our men and women in uniform…
Traumatic brain injury is now found in 30 percent of the injured veterans sent home to Walter Reed Army Medical Center from Iraq and Afghanistan�twice the percentage as in Vietnam. Often caused by the concussive force from insurgents’ improvised explosive devices or from penetrating head wounds, TBI can wipe out a victim’s memory, leave him blind, trigger epilepsy, or kill him outright. Many are calling it this war’s signature wound. So it’s no coincidence that the Army and Navy have expressed interest in the use of Oxycyte to deliver oxygen to the brain. Getting the military on board, Spiess says, improves the chance of getting the drug on a “fast track,� the sped-up FDA approval course that could put Oxycyte in Iraq by late next year.
Good for us. Bad for vampires.
This entry was posted on Wednesday, November 1st, 2006 and is filed under Science. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.
November 1st, 2006 at 4:00 pm
Yeah, yeah, spinal injuries, soldiers, injured children, whatever. The real question is this: can professional athletes use this as a new form of doping? And if I had some could I kick Lance Armstrong’s ass?
November 1st, 2006 at 4:04 pm
Well, it does say it has some side effects because it’s SO oxygen rich.
But yeah, we’ll probably see stuff like this eventually making its way into the bloodstream of athletes. Everything always does.
November 1st, 2006 at 4:18 pm
Funny that I also first thought of blood-doping and not curing or treating illnesses and injuries.
November 1st, 2006 at 5:19 pm
And if you gaze for long into an abyss, the abyss gazes also into
you…
November 1st, 2006 at 9:18 pm
“He who fights with monsters should look to it that he himself does not become a monster…. when you gaze long into the abyss, the abyss also gazes into you.” Nietzsche