Beef Blood

Many an exsanguine U.S. blood donor sighed with relief last week when he read an excited dispatch from London announcing that beef blood plasma can be used for human transfusions. But the use of beef blood is not new: doctors have long known that it could replace human blood plasma--if every trace of certain beef substances poisonous to man were removed.

Last autumn a U.S. blood expert, Julian Herman Lewis, announced that he had made beef plasma safe by treating it with alkali. Last week's real news was that Dr. F. Ronald Edwards of the University of Liverpool has figured out a way to purify it with heat. If one of these methods can be used for mass production, the plasma supply will be almost limitless--a 1,000-Ib. steer is 7% blood.

Research to find a substitute for human plasma does not stop with beef blood. Some substitutes that work: coconut milk, casein, isinglass (fish gelatin), pectin. But doctors still reserve their real enthusiasm for safe human plasma or human serum albumin.*

*Serum albumin is extracted from blood plasma by a newly perfected process. The albumin goes six times as far as an equivalent amount of plasma, is now being made for use by para troopers, small naval units, other troops with little room for luggage.

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