Last year, the blood transfusion service collected just over one million litres of blood from donors in the United Kingdom.
This enormous and expensive effort is currently the only way possible to produce the vast amount of blood needed for the millions of blood transfusions carried out each year.
A team of scientists in Edinburgh, Scotland is growing red blood cells in a laboratory, using embryonic stem cells, but it has a long way to go before it can achieve this on a large scale.
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