popsci.com — A man-made, pure-white compound called Oxycyte carries oxygen 50 times as effectively as our own blood. Researchers are betting that it’s the best way to treat America’s leading cause of accidental death: traumatic brain injury.
Oct 31, 2006 View in Crawl 4
anotherbrianNov 1, 2006
It would be awesome if you could take a hit of this before going free diving.
avolantNov 1, 2006
dear android who is 1337,that might be the weirdest thing ive ever seen written down.
madchemstNov 1, 2006
Well, I guess the reason we vilify it is because not everyone can afford the best performance enhancing drugs. I guess if everything were regulated, cost-effective and the side effects were known, it wouldn't be such a big deal since the entire common denominator is raised. What I take issue with is when someone has Nike sponsoring them and the other dude has to make it on his own dime but has to pay for all these performance enhancing drugs. Training as hard as an Olympic athlete is going to reduce your life expectancy regardless of whether you use steroids, human growth hormone, or any other performance enhancer. I'd just prefer if the playing field was reasonably level and everyone had access to all this crap.
bryrbNov 2, 2006
oh. didn't know that. still gross, but better than smashing heads in.
smarty2uNov 8, 2006
First of all - this smacked me in the brain! Wow!By all the comments - I think this is full of possibilties - though many of the ones posted here are a little ahead of ourselves - and some just silly, obviously. But I think we should give this a big round of applause - the possibilites are staggering, as are the implications. Helping heal tissues in a way no other treatment has - delivering oxygen to dying brain tissue - and think of all the moral and legal problem this could potentially solve that result from Doctors who feel blood is the only treatment and patients who refuse it for religious or moral reasons. Instead of changing the patient's views - or over riding them as if they don't count - they have found a way to do what many wanted all along - find a different treatment.Again - bravo!
urashimaNov 10, 2006
I think most of you are overlooking one major point. Putting aside the whole Theory of Evolution, I think that we need to look at the fact that we need blood donors. If, however if we do not have those than an artificial blood is in fact needed. It is not a matter of weather it is better than out own blood or not, I don't think doctors are trying to replace blood, but to help with victims of accidents. I know that if you commented on the article than you all must have read it, but this drug Oxycyte does in fact carry oxygen 50xs better than our own natural blood. This cuts the brain damage effect in half. I think we need to get over the title of the article and talk about the drug itself.
brainspinalcordJul 3, 2008
The whole miracle about this substitute is that it can reach damaged parts of the brain that "real" blood can't.there is a discussion on this at:<a class="user" href="http://www.brainandspinalcord.org/blog/2008/03/artificial-blood-to-treat-brain-injury/">http://www.brainandspinalcord.org/blog/2008/03/art ...</a>