Medicine: Blood from a Beet

The newest substitute for blood plasma is made from beets. Dextran, reported last week by Professor Arne Tiselius of Sweden’s Institute of Physical Chemistry, is a white, jellylike substance which results when the bacteria Leuconostoc mesenteroides lives in beet sugar (it has long been a plague of sugar factories because it clogs up the pipes).

Injected into a man’s veins, purified dextran has plasma’s ability to combat shock by maintaining the volume of blood in the veins. The dextran molecules are too large to leak out readily through capillary walls, and at the same time they attract water, hold it in the blood.

Professor Tiselius has not tried dextran on war casualties. (When plasma is available, it is, of course, the best thing to use.) He thinks dextran will eventually have wide use in civilian first-aid kits.

Last week the Red Cross began providing labels so that blood donors could sign their bottles for wounded soldiers to see. The Russians, who have long used this system, report that it has started many a soldier-donor romance.