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even when mixed with a storage medium, red blood cells have an official shelf life of between thirty-five and forty-nine days, depending on local laws.3 They last longer than milk but not as long as cheese.
‘repugnant
am my sixth version of myself, if most of my cells are replaced every seven years,31 but I’m on my 143rd round of red blood cells, which live for about 115 days.32 There is a popular philosophical question about identity and self, named Theseus’s ship or Theseus’s paradox: if all the planks were replaced in his vessel, was it still his ship? If I have replaced many of the cells I was born with, and have none of the red blood I had at Christmas, am I still me?
produces red blood cells, fresh frozen plasma (used for burns victims and to replace lost blood volume), platelets (used for clotting and by cancer patients), cryoprecipitate (also used to aid clotting), and leukodepleted whole blood, used for infants. Everything is organized and logged on a computer system, which obviously is called Pulse.
cryoprecipitate
Chicago’s Cook County Hospital, invented the concept of blood banking. Blood storage was already being done by then, but it was Fantus who thought up debt and repayment of blood, who saw blood as a product to be transacted, not a gift.
shouldn’t accept my blood anyway: like anyone else who was born in Britain or living there before 1996, I am a global pariah. Until a cure is found for variant Creutzfeldt-Jakob disease, whose infectious prion particles can live for years undetected in our bodies, my blood is considered unsafe anywhere outside my island.
When Jawaharlal Nehru was photographed giving blood in 1942, he was criticized for damaging his health, which was an important national treasure.42
India’s Supreme Court banned the sale of blood in 1996.43 It has also banned untouchability. Both bans are equally flexibly interpreted and both banned activities flourish happily. In 2008, for example, police acting on a tip-off raided a series of squalid tin sheds near Gorakhpur, Madhya Pradesh and found blood slaves.
But getting HIV through a blood transfusion in India is three thousand times more likely than in the United States,49 where the risks are 0.01 per cent, as in other high-income countries.50
Ro subtype (a version of the rhesus group), and Ro blood is more likely to be used to treat sicklecell anaemia. But only 2 per cent of the British population has it.
hirudin,11 vastly more efficient as an anticoagulant than man-made heparin, the next best blood thinner.
maladies
hermaphrodites
Bodleian Library even in her late eighties, inadvertently annoying other readers when her hearing aid hummed and whistled. (She turned it off when asked.) But when I arrived at Somerville and was assigned a room in Vaughan, I thought only with some relief that everyone would finally be able to spell my
