Artificial Blood?

Up to last week the most advanced technique for blood transfusion was to be found in Moscow. There, the instant someone commits suicide, dies of hears failure, or is killed by accident, an ambulance rushes his corpse to Sklifassovsky Institute for Urgent Aid where one of Surgeon Sergius Judin's aides quickly straps the body to a see-saw table, tilts it head down, drains the blood through a tap in the jugular vein. A small quantity of blood is set aside for laboratory study while the rest, treated with potassium citrate, goes into cold storage. Surgeon Judin, who perfected the storage of blood in wholesale quantities and arranged for the gathering of donor corpses, has revived moribund patients with blood stored as long as 30 days. Best results, however, came with 12-day-old blood.

The Judin method cheapens blood transfusions.* More important for vast, under-doctored U.S.S.R., storage blood can be shipped to isolated communities. And in the next war it can be kept at field hospitals.

Last week Professor William Ruthzauff Amberson of the University of Tennessee believed that he had progressed one important step beyond Moscow's technique because he had kept cats alive on nothing but ox blood. His method is to break down the bovine hemoglobin, the substance in red blood cells which carries oxygen throughout the body. This cell-free hemoglobin Professor Amberson mixes with Ringer's solution, common table and other salts in distilled water resembling the constitution of blood serum. Cats perfused completely with Dr. Amberson's blood mixture have lived as long as 36 hours. Then they died because the cell-free hemoglobin changed to methemoglobin which cannot carry life-giving oxygen to suffocating body cells. One of Professor Amberson's problems, before such artificial blood can be widely used, is to find a way to retard the formation of methemoglobin.

*Usual U. S. charge: about $35 per pint.

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