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Comment by derefr | Hacker News Reader

Apparently their first target is soon-to-expire donor blood erythrocytes — which makes this essentially a (pretty major) scalability improvement in how far existing donor blood goes.

However, that being said: hemoglobin’s just a protein. Recombinant hemoglobin isn’t overly challenging to produce — we do it already. (Currently mostly animal hemoglobin, for vegan meat — but it’s no different to produce human hemoglobin.) We don’t bother with synthesizing human hemoglobin because there’s (until now) no way to go from having a protein to having useful cells serving an erythrocytic function. This research changes that — and so will strongly motivate demand for such production. I would bet money that, 5–10 years out, you’ll be able to buy bags — even drums — of recombinant human hemoglobin from any biopharma supplier.

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> Currently mostly animal hemoglobin

Nope. They're making _plant_ hemoglobin ( https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Leghemoglobin ) to stay vegan.

Yes, I was also surprised that freaking plants have hemoglobin. But apparently, legume plants use it to create the oxygen-depleted environment for nitrogen fixing bacteria to work.

The way evolution can converge on symbiotic relationships like this always amazes me.

DNA alone is not plant or animal. It's effectively saying 1s and 0s can be vegan (or not). Pretty silly.

If it comes from an animal it's not vegan, pretty definitive line for them

It comes from neither animal nor plant. It comes from a computer.

There's a strong parallel here how pro-life activists view the use of human stem cells.

Indeed. It's an ethics issue, so it doesn't mean that it's wrong per se.

And the pro-life activists certainly have a similar argument. They're also welcome to holding it, as long as they don't impose it on others.

I think a lot of the HN crowd would argue that the pro-life belief on stem cell research is emphatically NOT welcome. So there is an element of hypocrisy here.

And why is this bad? I also disagree with pro-lifers. Especially about research restrictions they want to impose on others. It can be argued that such a viewpoint is too radical and maximalistic.

But as long as they themselves just stay away from stem-cells derived products, then it's their own personal choice. I also have no problems with, for example, Jehovah Witnesses that refuse blood-derived products.

If they have an ethics code, they are welcome to follow it, as long as they don't try to impose it on others.

In this particular case, accommodating even a maximalistic vegan position was not a big deal (just use hemoglobin from plants), so why not do it?

Not really, this is still a point of debate among vegan communities. Many of us have no moral issue with food grown using animal-derived biotech, as this does not require animal agriculture at all

Soon to expire, eh?

I wonder if the recently dead qualify.

Donated blood has a limited shelf life. So this is about the stocks the donation centers have. This tech can use the almost expired stocks to "recycle" the donations, instead of destroying it.

Yes, but what makes that life on the shelf, limited?

Would cavader blood still be viable, harvested an hour post death?

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