You can fake blood in the movies, but so far, there's no artificial substitute in real life. Peeking in on blood drives, wondering how blood gets from an arm to an operating table, producers Molly Webster and Soren Wheeler find a complex world that has them wondering if the gift of life isn't really a gift at all.

After listening to the story...

... dive deeper into the history and economy of blood with, Blood: An Epic History of Medicine and Commerce, by science writer Douglas Starr, which views hundreds of years of history through the lens of “red gold.”

... check out Gilbert Gaul’s Pulitzer Prize-winning series on the blood industry—what could be described as the first revelation that blood, in fact, was big business.

... get an international scope on not just the blood trade, but organ trafficking, with journalist Scott Carney’s at-times-not-for-the-squeamish book, The Red Market: On the Trail of the World's Organ Brokers, Bone Thieves, Blood Farmers, and Child Traffickers.

... follow the blood economy, watching things like prices and trends, over at AABB (a play on blood types, if we’ve never seen it!), by checking out the 2011 National Blood Collection and Utilization Survey

... and here's a bonus track: for at least the last five years, Orlando Sentinel reporter Dan Tracy has been the watchdog of the blood business in Florida, where cases of high salaries, insider trading, and outlandish costs for the price of blood are still happening.