Program Information

It is ironic that the horrors of warfare often produce advances in science. During World War II, the demands of treating battlefield wounded brought about a vast improvement in the delivery of blood.

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Transcript

Lead: It is ironic that the horrors of warfare often produce advances in science. During World War II, the demands of treating battlefield wounded brought about a vast improvement in the delivery of blood.

Tag: A Moment in Time with Dan Roberts.

Content: Combat surgeons in the First World War discovered that more soldiers died from loss of blood than from the physical damage of the bullets. When blood is drained from the body, arteries tend to collapse. Collapsed arteries cut off the remaining blood supply to the vital organs and as a result, the wounded go into shock. They suffer loss of color, cold clammy skin, and often sudden death.

So poor was the method of blood preservation that whole blood turned bad before it reached the front. Plasma, the liquid part of the blood, could be used to treat shock, but reconstituting plasma--even in the freeze dried form developed in the late 1930s--was very complicated and much too slow for combat conditions.

With war consuming Europe in the early 1940s the Army turned to Edwin Joseph Cohn, a Harvard biochemist, whose research specialty was organic proteins. Blood plasma is a clear but complex solution of water, salt, and proteins. Cohn assembled a team and set out to separate from plasma a medically useful and easily stored part of plasma called albumin, which, if injected into the bloodstream, would absorb enough liquid from the body to keep the arteries from collapsing and thus prevent shock. This process of separating the parts of plasma is known as fractionation.

By the end of 1941 Cohn, through fractionation, had accumulated an inventory of albumin. In the aftermath of Pearl Harbor it was tried as an experiment on servicemen wounded in the attack and proved a huge success. Cohn then headed up a huge wartime effort to mass produce albumin and other blood products which in turn revolutionized battlefield surgery, saving countless lives and making possible full recovery for thousands of wounded soldiers.

At the University of Richmond, this is Dan Roberts.

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