GENETIC EDITING

 

Life has existed on this planet for nearly 4 billion years. Human history begins only 300,000 years ago with the appearance of the Homo Sapiens and only in the last 65 years we have figured out how DNA works, built machines that could read it and then tools that could rewrite it. Technological development is faster and faster and with it more and more debates on ethics are opening up. One of these is about genetic editing: if humans had the technology to control the source code of life, what would happen when we turn it on ourselves?

HOW DO BLOOD TRANSFUSIONS WORK ?

FIRST ATTEMPTS

In 1881 a physician named William Halsted successfully carried out a blood transfusion injecting his blood in his sister Minnie who was dying for a hemorrhage after giving birth to her child. This was one of the few successful cases,      in which that was possible, because they had the same blood type (which is not guaranteed even among close relatives). One of the first experiments was made in 1667 by Jean Baptiste Denys,      who tested this practice on a man called Antoine Mauroy using the blood of a sheep to treat his psychosis.  At the first try everything seemed good,   but after the second one he started to run a fever, had a pain in his lower back and a sting in his arm, then he urinated a thick black liquid.