For six decades, man donated blood, saved 2.4 million babies

In 1951, a 14-year-old Australian boy named James Harrison awoke from a major chest operation. Doctors had removed one of his lungs in a procedure that had taken several hours—and would keep him hospitalized for three months. But Harrison was alive, thanks in large part to a vast quantity of transfused blood he had received, his father explained.

At the time, Australia’s laws required blood donors to be at least 18 years old. After turning 18, Harrison began donating whole blood regularly with the Australian Red Cross Blood Service, he told CNN’s Sanjay Gupta decades later.

Meanwhile, doctors in Australia were struggling to figure out why thousands of births were resulting in miscarriages, stillbirths or brain defects for the babies.

The babies, it turned out, were suffering from haemolytic disease of the newborn, or HDN. The condition most often arises when a woman with an Rh negative blood type becomes pregnant with a baby who has Rh positive blood, and the incompatibility causes the mother’s body to reject the fetus’s red blood cells.

Doctors realized, however, that it might be possible to prevent HDN by injecting the pregnant woman with a treatment made from donated plasma with a rare antibody.

Researchers scoured blood banks to see whose blood might contain this antibody— and found James Harrison.

Before long, researchers had developed an injection called Anti-D using plasma from Harrison’s donated blood, according to Robyn Barlow, the Rh program coordinator.

Harrison continued donating for more than 60 years and his plasma has been used to make millions of Anti-D injections, according to the Red Cross. Because about 17 percent of pregnant women in Australia require the anti-D injections, the blood service estimates Harrison has helped 2.4 million babies in the country.