Real-Life True Blood : Synthetic Blood Is Coming — And So Are a Host of Potential Complications

Season 6 of HBOs vampire drama True Blood premieres on Sunday night, presumably following up on last years cliffhanger where the factory that produces Tru-Blood the bottled synthetic blood that allows vampires go vegetarian was burned to the ground, destroying the product that made it possible for vampires to non-violently co-exist with people.

But out here in the real world, the future of synthetic blood is just beginning. After decades of global research, controversies, and failed approval petitions, the UKs Medical and Healthcare products Regulatory Agency finally gave researchers at the Scottish Centre for Regenerative Medicine the go-ahead late last month to start developing synthetic blood with adult stem cells.

The license allows the researchers to use already-recognized stem cell technology to create a compound that would both eliminate the risk of infusion-transmitted infections and supplement (if not eventually take the place of) chronically limited blood banks worldwide. After years of partial synthetic successes at best, it will permit the first-ever human clinical trials of synthetic blood. Oh, also? The license permits blood manufacturing on an industrial scale. Cue the True Blood overture (albeit sans vampires).

And according to Ruha Benjamin, a sociologist at Boston University, the arrival of synthetic blood is also likely to come with some serious socioeconomic and ethical issues, including ones that have complicated many medical advances before it.

Benjamin is the author of Peoples Science: Bodies and Rights on the Stem Cell Frontier, a new book that explores the social forces that inform and arise from scientific research, especially controversial medical practices like stem cell trials. Though her research focuses specifically on the politics of paying clinical egg donors in California, the patterns of structural inequality she outlines are in danger of repeating themselves in Scotland and later, in the rest of the world. The two major quagmires, she told Wired, lie in how clinical trials for synthetic blood are conducted and in the potential patenting of the technology.

According to its statements in The Scotsman, the Scottish Centre for Regenerative Medicine will produce synthetic blood for the trials using induced pluripotent stem cells adult cells that can be forced to act like embryotic stem cells. That means theyll need stem cell donors as well as, later on, transfusion recipients, and neither of those come free.

Most clinical trials offer some compensation, said Benjamin. They dont call it payment; they consider it a stipend, to offset the burden of participating. That means that, for the most part, people who are well off are not participating. People signing up on websites for clinical trials are often working-class people.

This sort of compensation is substantial enough, she says, that it has resulted in professional guinea pigs: transient workers who make a sparse living ($15,000 to $20,000, roughly) by participating in clinical trials. They know where trials are held, who is conducting them, and where communal housing is available to them across the country, and they rack up paychecks as they go. A decent percentage of clinical trials include these participants, said Benjamin, at least in the U.S.

Its a case in which people who cant find any other kind of work discover that the little bit of compensation you get through participating ends up being enough, she said. Those people, again often working classes, are willing to bear the risks of the trials. She says that theres no reason to think that the participants in the testing of synthetic blood will be any different.

Clinical trials for any foreign substance like synthetic blood also need to be performed on pharmaceutically nave subjects: people whose bodies arent already full of drugs. Again, that often means exploiting the working class, as well as outsourcing to developing countries.

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Real-Life True Blood : Synthetic Blood Is Coming — And So Are a Host of Potential Complications