Unlock the editor’s summary for free
Roula Khalaf, editor of the FT, selects her favorite stories in this weekly newsletter.
James Harrison, who is attributed to having saved the lives of more than 2 million babies, was not a famous doctor or a avant -garde scientist.
The modest Australian rail worker, who died at age 88, changed the fortune of so many families through pure chance: the extraordinary qualities of his own blood.
The man with the golden arm, when they called him, gave Plasma 1, 173 times more than 50 years until, for his disgust, he was forced to stop at 81. If the rules had allowed it, says his grandson, Jarrod Bellowswip, “would have continued until the day he died.” It gave him a purpose. ”
Harrison grew up in a small city in Nueva Wales del Sur, where many, including their own father, were employed in the railroads. After leaving school, he followed the same path, becoming an employee and then administrative director.
But he had found the mission of his life at the age of only 14 years after undergoing a dangerous operation so that part of a lung is eliminated. His father told him that he had needed 13 liters of blood, “and my life had been saved by unknown people,” he recalled in a 2015 interview. This close call, and a conviction that his survival to the kindness of strangers owed, were to shape his life. As soon as he turned 18 in 1954, he became a blood donor.
However, Fate was about to offer him a rare opportunity to make a much greater contribution. For many years, doctors had fought to explain why some babies died in the uterus or shortly after birth. Then came the key discovery that if a woman with negative rhesus blood took a positive Rhesus child, the fetal cells that leaked in the mother’s circulation were incompatible with her, which resulted in an immune response. This led to the production of an antibody that would destroy or damage its future positive rhesus fetuses or newborn babies.
One of the most fundamental advances of modern medicine occurred in 1966. Doctors realized that an injection of an anti-D antibody would avoid this maternal reaction. Robyn Barlow, who was later in charge of donors from the blood service of the Red Cross of Australia, now known as Bloud Life, said: “It was a revolution in medicine because since that day a mother was not needed to lose a [Rhesus] baby.”
But then the search was underway for people with high levels of antibody in their blood. Barlow remembers having found, in his donor archives, Harrison, who had received negative rhesus blood and positive Rhesus during his surgery more than 15 years before. The result was that his blood was unusually rich in anti-D of produced naturally.
At his first meeting, he found a tall and handsome man with a smile and an attractive way. He had taken the opportunity to participate in the new program, he recalled. “He said: ‘Oh, this is fantastic.’ All his mission in life was to pay society or medicine for those 13 units of blood he obtained.”
His grandson recalls that after retiring at age 50, his biweekly visits to the blood donation center along with his hobbies, from collecting seals and port bottles (largely unbridled), to the caravan and the pug breeding, occupied the rest of his life.
Mellowship says that Harrison was always humble about his uniquely sustained civic altruism. Even when a medal of the Australian order was awarded, marking the outstanding achievement, in 1999, followed by the recognition of the Guinness record book as the most prolific plasma donor in the world in 2005, he remained ambivalent about his place in the center of attention, halfway to love attention, half of resisting it, says Mellowhip.
But one achievement meant more for him than any other. A grandson and several great-grandchildren were born just because their daughter and granddaughter could receive anti-D. “He could have grandchildren, and then great -grandchildren, only due to [his donations]”Mellowhship says.
Surprisingly, Harrison had a lifelong aversion for the needles, his grandson said. “I hated him, he had to look the other way. I never saw him enter. ”
For Barlow, Harrison embodied the “generosity and grace” of all donors of blood and plasma, but there was something exceptional. “I had a beautiful hemoglobin and anti-D. . . They were all champions, those women and men [who donated]But he was the champion of the champions. ”