There is an episode in Elementary that involves the Horseshoe, its extraction and conservation. It is just a regular episode, but the visual presentation of the extraction was fascinating. I hope they are real. :)
Few things look more cruel and dystopic than the rooms where they harvest the blood of horseshoe crabs
yep, if there was hint of cruelty in the matrix where machines harvested humans for energy, this may not be so different.
Can't spell cruel and dystopic without Eli Lilly.
Is there any alternative to using horseshoe crab blood in the development of the pharmaceutical compounds that keep us safe?
Recombinant factor C (rFC) has been available since 2003.
TFA alludes to it: “They have created a lab-made alternative to test medicines, so no crabs are needed.
“It is the exact same protein, it is just made through biotechnology,” Bolden said.
Bolden said scientists at Eli Lilly tested thousands of samples on hundreds of different products and determined the alternative performs the same or better than purified horseshoe crab blood does.
Starting in 2016, Eli Lilly started to switch its testing to the lab-made version. Now 80 percent of it is done using the alternative.
The company plans to entirely eliminate the use of crab blood.”
They are a (relatively) recent part of the production pipeline. Before introducing horseshoe crab blood, they used to inject rabbits and wait a couple of weeks. Now the wait has been reduced to minutes - which reduces storage costs and increases certainty.
But there are other options.
There's economics wrapped up in finding a reproducible synthetic replacement against harvesting. If climate change causes a drop in horseshoe crab availability we might see the pressure here.
Lol. They have survived many mass extinctions. The horseshoe crabs will be aeound long after we are all dead. Once we stop actively killing them, they will recover.
It’s in the article - Eli Lilly has largely switched to a synthetic protein.
Has anyone on HN gotten the horseshoe crab pin and can share the story?
Go crabs go!