Today, an interesting tale about blood. The
University of Houston's College of Engineering
presents this series about the machines that make
our civilization run, and the people whose
ingenuity created them.
Charles Richard Drew was
born in 1904 in a black neighborhood in the
so-called Foggy Bottom area of Washington, D.C. His
intellectual and athletic abilities were soon
evident. He went to Amherst College on scholarship
in 1922 and served as both captain of the track
team and football quarterback.
At the time, even in the North, most public
institutions were still segregated. Drew was a
campus hero, but he couldn't belong to most honor
societies. He lived in a tough world, and his
career plans made it tougher. He wanted to go to
medical school. His bachelor's degree had left him
in debt, so he took a job as athletic director and
chemistry teacher at Morgan College -- a small
black school in Baltimore. Two years later he was
able to enter medical school at McGill University
in Canada.
He finished his internship, and a residency in
surgery, in 1935. But all the time another interest
had been welling up. He wanted to solve the problem
of preserving blood for transfusions. He spent
three years teaching at Howard Medical School and
then went to Columbia University to do his Ph.D. on
blood storage.
He finished a thesis, titled Banked
Blood, in 1940. It was a monumental work. He
was now the world expert in preserving human blood.
He'd developed the notion of separating and storing
plasma to the point that it was a practical
reality. And this was the first doctorate Columbia
ever awarded to a black.
As a result of his work, the R.A.F. and the
American Red Cross asked Drew to take charge of a
program to make blood available for soldiers in
Europe. And Drew did just that. His superb
leadership transmuted research into an effective
program of blood collection, storage, and
distribution.
Then the Armed Forces gave in to pressures and
ordered that only Caucasian blood would be given to
American soldiers. Drew called a press conference
to point out what every educated person knew --
that black and white blood were quite
indistinguishable. He resigned as director of the
blood program, and he left blood plasma work. He
went back to Howard to teach surgery. After nine
years of distinguished work, he and three interns
set off one night for a meeting two days later at
Tuskegee Institute. Drew dozed at the wheel and
crashed. The steering wheel crushed his chest, and
he died within an hour.
According to a widely-told story, he died because
he was denied a transfusion at a white hospital.
Not so. Medics at the scene knew who this great
surgeon was. They would have bent any such rules to
save him. The story survives, not because it was
true, but because, in 1950, such a thing could have
been true.
I'm John Lienhard, at the University of Houston,
where we're interested in the way inventive minds
work.
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