by Annie Zhang
Black History Month celebrates incredible black figures from both the past and the present. It is The Helix’s tribute to Black History Month, and an effort to incorporate diverse narratives into the STEM curriculum.
“So much of our energy is spent in overcoming the constricting environment in which we live that little energy is left for creating new ideas or things… It should be the aim of every student in science to knock down at least one or two bricks of that wall by virtue of his own accomplishment.” -- Charles Drew
Born June 3, 1904, in Washington D.C., Charles Drew was the son of Richard and Nora Drew, and the older brother to four younger siblings in a middle-class, well-educated, but still racially segregated neighborhood, named Foggy Bottom. People called him “Charlie” growing up, and even later, as an adult. From age twelve, he began a series of odd jobs: supervising city playgrounds, working construction jobs, and lifeguarding the local swimming pool. Once, after just a year as a paperboy, selling Washington news from a street corner, he’d roped six other boys into working for him, rapidly expanding his reach and sales. In school, Charles was smart, but not exceptional; instead, he was known for his competitive athleticism, lettering in four sports his junior and senior year, and winning his school’s “best athlete,” “most popular student,” and “student who has done the the most for the school” superlatives.
In 1922, Drew graduated high school and headed to Amherst College on an athletic scholarship, where he distinguished himself as a track and football legend. Despite his athletic prowess, Drew, as one of only 13 African Americans in a class of 600, faced resolute hostility and dismissal from both opposing and home teams. Drew’s own football team, for example, passed him over as captain in senior year, despite his being their best athlete. Beyond sports, Drew wasn’t academically exceptional, and, in fact, didn’t have a clear direction until his biology professor, Otto Glasser, piqued his interest in the medical sciences.
After graduating Amherst, Drew’s next step was med school. To save up the money, Drew taught at Morgan State University as a biology and chemistry instructor; on the side, he worked as the school’s athletic director, coaching its mediocre sports teams into serious collegiate competitors. Two years later, after applying to med school amidst the racial segregation of the pre-Civil Rights era, Drew was rejected from Howard College, and accepted but deferred a year at Harvard. Not wanting to wait, he instead enrolled at McGill University in Montréal, popular for its fair treatment of minorities. At McGill, Drew once again became a popular athlete, and, this time around, a distinguished student as well, winning several notable prizes, honors, and scholarships, and graduating second in a class of 137, in 1933. After graduation, Drew had hoped to continue his surgical residency at the Mayo Clinic, but because white patients back then refused to be seen by black physicians, he was barred from entry at all major American medical centers.
Instead, in 1935, Drew joined the faculty at Howard College, and, as part of his training as junior faculty, trained under eminent surgeon Allen Whipple at New York’s Presbyterian Hospital in 1938. Whipple initially restricted Drew from the traditional path and privileges of his white peer residents, barring him from attending patients, as per the hospital’s tradition, and reassigning him under John Scudder to set up an experimental blood bank. But with his soft-spoken charm, natural brilliance, and, as one of his colleagues cynically noted, light-skinned complexion, Drew quickly won over Scudder, his fellow residents and hospital staff, and Whipple as well, who eventually became one of Drew’s strongest allies, supporting both his surgical training and his doctoral research at Columbia.
In Scudder’s lab, Drew researched fluid balance, diagnosis and control of shock, and transfusion. The crux of his work focused on how to “bank” blood, so it would be available for transfusions as needed. At the time, one of the biggest problems in the medical field was that blood loses its integrity, and thus its utility, soon after leaving the vessels. In other words, it clots, the cellular elements deteriorate, the electrolyte levels change, and thus, blood quickly becomes unviable. For his doctoral dissertation, Drew analyzed blood and transfusion research to date, then applied his findings to Scudder’s experimental blood bank. His experiment was a success of strict protocols (donors had to be recruited, scheduled, and screened before “bleeding”; blood had to be collected with sterile equipment into sterile containers, then treated with anticoagulant and stored in refrigerators), and ultimately earned Drew his doctor of medical science degree in June of 1940.
Then, in September 1939, Hitler invaded Poland, and WWII took off in Europe. By mid-June, German forces had taken the Netherlands, Belgium, and France, and Britain, forced to retreat, was rained down with German bombs for the rest of the summer. With Britain in desperate need of medical supplies, including blood and plasma for transfusion, the Blood Transfusion Betterment Association (BTBA), National Research Council (NRC), and American Red Cross organized a relief program, Blood for Britain (BFB), to collect blood donations and ship blood plasma to England. Plasma is the clear, yellow fluid portion of blood, containing various proteins and electrolytes but no cells, and can be used as a blood substitute to replace fluids and treat shock. Especially for emergency or combat situations, blood plasma is preferred over whole blood because: it keeps longer without refrigeration; it doesn’t deteriorate when agitated; it can be used with any blood type; it is less likely to transmit diseases; and it can be given intravenously, intramuscularly, or subcutaneously in large doses.
Blood for Britain appointed Drew, Scudder, and E. H. L. Corwin to blueprint an enormously scaled-up version of Scudder’s experimental blood bank. In addition to the bank, the team set up procedures for extracting plasma and transporting it securely to Britain. They separated the liquid plasma from the blood cells by centrifugation and sedimentation, then cultured the plasma for bacteria, added merthiolate (an anti-bacterial), and tested the batch again a week later before diluting it with sterile saline and shipping to England. By the time Blood for Britain concluded in 1941, it was considered a remarkable success, having collected 14,556 blood donations and shipped over 5,000 liters of plasma saline solution to England.
Drew then went on to become the assistant director for a three-month Red Cross pilot program to mass-produce dried plasma in New York. During this time, he introduced mobile blood collection units, or “bloodmobiles,” and became publicly known as a blood plasma pioneer and the “father of the blood bank.” Ironically, national blood collection projects were sullied by racism. Blood donations and plasma were segregated, and black donors were often excluded from blood collection, a blatant insult to African Americans, who were just as capable of contributing to the war effort as anyone else. Drew spoke out frequently about these cases of segregation, citing the absence of any scientific difference between blood of different races. As Drew said in his Spingarn Medal acceptance speech in 1944:
"It is fundamentally wrong for any great nation to willfully discriminate against such a large group of its people. . . . One can say quite truthfully that on the battlefields nobody is very interested in where the plasma comes from when they are hurt. . . . It is unfortunate that such a worthwhile and scientific bit of work should have been hampered by such stupidity."
Nevertheless, whether it was the blood exclusion policy or his eagerness to return home to his wife and baby girl, Bebe (named for the Blood Bank), Drew soon left the Red Cross pilot program. In 1941, he resumed his faculty duties at Howard College, where he served for the next nine years as Head of the Department of Surgery and Chief of Surgery. His ambition now was to train young African American surgeons to meet the most rigorous surgical standards, and to position them strategically throughout the country so they could generate a tradition of excellence. This, Drew believed, would be his greatest contribution to medicine, and his other accomplishments, his blood bank, were meant only as a “preface.” In 1948, Drew’s first group of residents passed their Board of Surgery exams, and between 1941 and 1950, Drew trained more than half of the black surgeons certified. Drew died tragically in North Carolina on April 1, 1950. In the early morning, he and three colleagues set out for a free clinic in Tuskegee, Alabama. Approaching North Carolina, driving fast, Drew fell asleep behind the wheel. When he woke up, the car was running off the road, and, trying to pull it back on course, Drew over-corrected, toppling the car. Half out of the car, with his right leg stuck on the pedals, Drew’s chest was crushed, his neck broken, and his leg torn, as the car rolled over and over and over. Drew was taken immediately to the nearby Alamance General Hospital, where three white physicians worked frantically to save his life. They gave him blood transfusions, his very own life’s work, but with his major blood vessels ruptured and other fatal injuries, Drew died just hours later. Sources:
1. The Charles R. Drew Papers. (n.d.). Retrieved from http://profiles.nlm.nih.gov/BG/ 2. Charles Richard Drew. (n.d.). Retrieved from https://www.acs.org/content/acs/en/education/whatischemistry/african-americans-in-sciences/charles-richard-drew.html