I recently purchased from Amazon, but have not read, Good Blood, which describes the discovery of a cure, and the struggle for acceptance of the cure, for the RH disease sketched in the passages quoted below. The disease affected my family, but I am not sure I remember exactly how. I am Rh positive and I think my mother was Rh negative. I think with each child after me, there was increasing risk and worry of possible bad health effects.
According to the Amazon summary for Good Blood, the book also describes the devotion of master blood donor James Harrison, whose recent obituary is quoted below.
Starting at least in the 1960s medical experts were often optimistic that future medical advances would come from designer chemicals enabled by scientific advances in our knowledge of chemistry and biological processes. Taxpayer funding was devoted to that approach in Nixon’s War on Cancer. But fewer medical advances have come from that approach than hoped, and more advances than expected have continued to come from the evolved usable chemicals (sometimes poisons, sometimes antibodies) of plants, animals, and exceptional human beings like Mr. Harrison.
Mao is often misquoted as saying ‘Let a thousand flowers bloom,’ but someone should say it (at least if the cost of planting the flowers is not too high).
(p. A25) James Harrison did not much care for needles. Whenever he donated plasma, he would look away as the tip went into his arm.
But Mr. Harrison was one of the most prolific donors in history, extending his arm 1,173 times. He may have also been one of the most important: Scientists used a rare antibody in his plasma to make a medication that helped protect an estimated 2.4 million babies in Australia from possible disease or death, medical experts say.
“He just kept going and going and going,” his grandson Jarrod Mellowship said in an interview on Monday [March 3, 2025]. “He didn’t feel like he had to do it. He just wanted to do it.”
. . .
Mr. Harrison’s plasma contained the rare antibody anti-D. Scientists used it to make a medication for pregnant mothers whose immune systems could attack their fetuses’ red blood cells, according to Australian Red Cross Lifeblood.
Anti-D helps protect against problems that can occur when babies and mothers have different blood types, most often if the fetus is “positive” and the mother is “negative,” according to the Cleveland Clinic. (The positive and negative signs are called the Rhesus factor, or Rh factor.)
In such cases, a mother’s immune system might react to the fetus as if it were a foreign threat. That can lead babies to develop a dangerous and potentially fatal condition, hemolytic disease of the fetus and newborn, which can cause anemia and jaundice.
. . .
In Australia, scientists from the Walter and Eliza Hall Institute of Medical Research in Melbourne are working to create a synthetic version of the drug using what some have called “James in a Jar,” an antibody that can be made in a lab.
But for now, human donors are essential: The anti-D shots are made with donated plasma, and Mr. Harrison was one of about 200 donors among the 27 million people in Australia, Lifeblood said.
. . .
Mr. Harrison knew the importance of his work firsthand. At 14, he needed a lot of blood transfusions during a major lung surgery. The experience inspired him to donate and encourage others to donate, too.
For the full obituary, see:
(Note: ellipses, and bracketed date, added.)
(Note: the online version of the obituary was updated March 7, 2025, and has the title “James Harrison, Whose Antibodies Helped Millions, Dies at 88.”)
The Good Blood book, mentioned above, is:
Guthrie, Julian. Good Blood: A Doctor, a Donor, and the Incredible Breakthrough That Saved Millions of Babies. New York: Harry N. Abrams Press, 2020.
