The possibilities, he was quoted as saying, are quite extraordinary. Once it has been fully tested and certified -- and an effective mass-production technique has been perfected -- man-made blood may result in a worldwide end to blood donation, screening for diseases, blood group differentiation in stocks and shortages in the wake of big accidents and natural disasters.

We quickly learned that the race to create this magical elixir has become a scientific version of the holy grail: The international quest has attracted a motley crew of genuine academic researchers, garden-shed kooks and profit-hungry con-men.  The concept of making blood in a lab is not new, of course, and has even been perfected by some companies. The difference is that other synthetic bloods have always relied on at least one element based on actual hemoglobin. Tsuchida's blood is a world first for having every part of the compound manufactured synthetically in a lab.

It sounded too good to be true, so it was with a fair measure of scepticism that we called the professor himself. He was very eager to see us. When we turned up at his labs in Waseda university in northwest Tokyo, Tsuchida wasted no time handing over the fruits of his 31 years of labor -- a bottle he gleefully described as "rich, red and beautiful."  The testing was already underway with lab animals, and the human tests -- a series of transfusions -- are being prepared as we write. The young researchers are all graduates of Japan's, Britain's and America's finest universites. They sat in awe of the professor as he clicked through slide after slide of successful lab results.

Tsuchida concluded that he had nearly finished building a factory outside Tokyo to "brew" large quantities of Albumin, the critical ingredient, from yeast, and he believes that emergency services will be able to carry stocks of his blood -- which can be stored at room temperature, is not blood-group specific and has a shelf-life of 24 months -- within a few years.

But, per usual in Japan, we left disappointed. Here was man who would be a celebrity anywhere else in the world. But he remains an unknown because of the odd relationship between Japan and its researchers, Japan and creativity, Japan and ... the individual with talent.  In the US, he would have formed a company, pushed out an IPO and have prepared a super-slick, TV-ready speech ready to woo serious investors. The problem is not that the Japanese are not great inventors -- it's that they don't have the slightest clue about how to sell their best ideas.