From:	Cobra <wgallas@*****.FR>
Subject:	Re: Giving blood in 205X: common or rare?
Date:	Wed, 20 May 1998 10:13:23 +0200

>upon one occasion danyel woods wrote:
>----------
>| Having submitted to the Red Cross and their needles last Thursday for
>| the public good (and it didn't hurt a bit!), I was paging through Aztlan
>| and met the Blood Magic section, which got me thinking.
>|
>| In our modern world, giving blood is no big deal; as long as there's no
>| risk of infection or you're not a haemophiliac, it's not a danger. In
>| Shadowrun, though, a blood sample can be used for ritual sendings, blood
>| magic, and lots of other creative nastiness. Given this, would people
>| would actually give blood (whether to a corporate or public
>| health-provider)? What would it say about those people? What sort of
>| psychological/sociological issues would this produce - e.g., would it
>| become a litmus test, like abortion/affirmative action/gun-control?
>
>wow, a very good question. do they synthesize all the blood using a better
>grade plasma than we can produce now??? i think given how many things can
>be grown (limbs and all that crap) that hospitals would just produce blood
>in percentages according to the percentage of different blood types in the
>nation or corp they serve. just another charge to add on to your hospital
>bill!!! (and they love to do that).
>
>so saying that, i do not think, IMHO, that people would be needed to give
>blood, except to replenish supplies of blood that are used to grow/produce
>blood/plasma through cloning/vat growth techniques. think, in shadowtech
>they talk about it in the comments, where KAM from Universal Omnitech says
>(paraphrased) that they produce a whole body just for an arm and recycle
>the rest, but probably steal the blood first (and other parts) as well.

That's fine but we could add some points :
1/ It's always less costly when people give their blood than when you have
to clone it.
2/ I don't think people bother about giving their blood, even in SR. Most
joe citizens don't know anything about rituals, blood magic and other
things like this.
3/ A good plot would be for an institute to use rituals on the custommers
who gave them some blodd. Perhaps they could develop a way to cast a ritual
on multiple targets and influence them to buy some products.

- Cobra.