SINCE early last year, a new liquid began flowing through the veins and arteries of certain blood-starved hospital patients. This amazing oxygen-carrying fluid was used, first in Japan, and then in the United States, for emergency situations where, for medical or religious reasons, patients could not receive human blood transfusions. Many of these cases had rare blood types, for which there was no blood immediately available. But a number of Jehovah’s Witnesses, who do not accept transfusions because of the Biblical command to “abstain from . . . blood,” also received this “synthetic blood.”​—Acts 15:20, 29.

By the end of the year, scores of such emergency cases in Japan and in the United States had been treated with the new blood substitute. News of these developments was headlined in the public press and medical journals around the world.

Developing “Artificial Blood”

One of the greatest disadvantages of volume expanders is their complete inability to carry oxygen to, and carbon dioxide from, the cells, as the red cells in natural blood do. However, over the last 10 years scientists in Japan, Sweden and the United States have been developing a group of substances called perfluorochemicals (PFC) that do have the ability to carry oxygen and carbon dioxide.

Extensive animal experiments with PFC emulsions have been carried out in recent years. Japanese research showed that rats survive with 90 percent of their blood replaced by PFC.

Japanese scientists claim that monkeys have survived with only 2 percent of their own blood left. (See Awake!, August 8, 1979, page 31.)

At this time, government agencies restrict the use of fluorocarbon “blood substitutes” to emergency cases only, both in Japan and in the United States.