Blood (31 page)

In addition to winning the Nobel Prize, E. Donnall Thomas — born in Texas in 1920 — met his future wife in the course of a snowball fight. It must be an effective way to launch a romance, because he and Dorothy Martin remained married until he died, sixty years after their wedding. For an article about E. Donnall Thomas and his groundbreaking scientific work, which culminated in 1969 with a bone marrow transplant using a matched sibling donor for a patient, see Denise Gellene, “E. Donnall Thomas, Who Advanced Bone Marrow Transplants, Dies at 92,”
New York Times,
October 21, 2012.

The history of stem cell research also owes much to Canadians. Ernest McCulloch and James Till proved the existence of stem cells in 1961 and defined their properties in 1963, and thus became known as the “fathers of stem cell research.” See the article “James Till 1931–, Ernest McCulloch 1926–2011,” on the website of the Canada Science and Technology Museum, at
www.sciencetech.technomuses.ca
.

For more about Ernest McCulloch's work on stem cells, see
Wikipedia
, “Ernest McCulloch.”

For details about the work of the Nobel Prize–winning American biologist James Thomson, who isolated stem cells from human embryos in 1998 and then showed in 2007 that it is possible to transform skin cells into human embryos, see Gina Kolata, “Man Who Helped Start Stem Cell War May End It,”
New York Times
, November 22, 2007; and
Wikipedia
, “James Thomson (cell biologist).”

“The Stem Cell Research Controversy” was posted January 5, 2011, on the website
Stem Cell History
:
www.stemcellhistory.com
.

The
CBC
news report “Stem Cells
FAQ
s,” posted October 12, 2010, can be found at
www.cbc.ca/news/health/story/2009/01/07/f-stemcells.html
.

Wikipedia
, “Stem Cell Controversy.”

Opposed to embryonic stem cell research: The Center for Bioethics and Human Dignity at Trinity International University, Deerfield, Illinois:
http://cbhd.org/stem-cell-research/overview
.

In favour: Francisco D. Lara, “Should We Sacrifice Embryos to Cure People?”
Human Affairs
22, no. 4, October 2012.

“Shinya Yamanaka: Facts,” on
Nobelprize.org
,
http://www.nobelprize.org/nobel_prizes/medicine/laureates/2012/yamanaka-facts.html
.

Matt Ridley, “Mind & Matter: Stem Cells Without the Controversy,”
Wall Street Journal
, December 8, 2012.

Dennis Normille, “First Clinical Trial with Induced Pluripotent Stem Cells Grows Closer,”
ScienceInsider
, June 26, 2013.

PAGES 98–99: THE DESIRE TO DONATE BLOOD

Richard M. Titmuss,
The Gift Relationship: From Human Blood to Social Policy
(Pantheon Books, 1971).

Eric M. Meslin, Patrick M. Rooney, and James G. Wolf, “Health Related Philanthropy: Towards Understanding the Relationship Between the Donation of the Body (and Its Parts) and Traditional Forms of Philanthropic Giving,”
Nonprofit and Voluntary Sector Quarterly
(Supplement), 2008.

Gene Curtis, “Donors Overwhelm Blood Banks after 9/11 Attacks,”
Tulsa World,
August 29, 2011.

PAGE 100: TUSKEGEE SYPHILIS STUDY

Susan M. Reverby,
Examining Tuskegee: The Infamous Syphilis Study and Its Legacy
(University of North Carolina Press, 2009).

E. M. Meslin and D. Mathieu, “The Tuskegee Syphilis Study,” in Robert H. Blank and Janna Merrick, eds.,
Encyclopedia of US Biomedical Policy
(Greenwood Publishing, 1996).

Wikipedia
, “Tuskegee Syphilis Experiment.”

PAGES 100–106: CHARLES DREW AND BERNARD LOWN

During World War II, the American Red Cross first banned blacks from donating blood, and then, after facing an outcry from the black community, ruled that African-Americans could donate blood that would be segregated and thus not transfused into whites, as described in Spencie Love,
One Blood: The Death and Resurrection of Charles R. Drew
(University of North Carolina Press, 1996). I drew quotes from pages 155–58 about Drew's objections to the blood segregation policies. In addition to biographical material, Love's book explores myth-making in the United States, and how Americans came to believe falsely that Drew died of blood loss in a car accident after a hospital in North Carolina refused to treat him because he was black.

Although policies of racial segregation affected nearly every walk of life in the American South in the early and mid-twentieth century, Drew died after a serious car accident, despite being treated promptly and thoroughly at the hospital.

Another biography of Charles Drew was published eight years before Love's book: Charles E. Wynes,
Charles Richard Drew: The Man and the Myth
(University of Illinois Press, 1988).

See
Wikipedia
, “Charles R. Drew,”
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Charles_R._Drew
.

In an interview on the
British Medical Journal
website, Dr. Bernard Lown speaks with Elizabeth Loder about the end of segregation by race of blood donations in the Johns Hopkins Hospital, at
www.bmj.com/multimedia/video/2012/05/28/bernard-lown-part-3-segregation-blood-bank
.

Lown delves deeper into the issue on his blog (
http://bernardlown.wordpress.com
), in “Black Blood Must Not Contaminate White Folks” (Essay 25), September 3, 2011.

PAGES 109–14: BLOOD DONATION POLICIES REGARDING MEN WHO HAVE SEX WITH MEN

Who is and who is not allowed to donate blood? Answers to this question touch a raw nerve, because we tend to feel that they rank our value as human beings. Are we or are we not worthy of giving blood? Here are some sources of information:

The World Health Organization says that blood donations should not be accepted from men who have sex with men. See pages 87 and 88 of
Blood Donor Selection: Guidelines on Assessing Donor Suitability for Blood Donation
(2012), at
www.who.int/bloodsafety/publications
.

American Red Cross blood donation exclusion policies, including a lifetime ban on donations from men who have had sex with men:
www.redcrossblood.org/donating-blood/eligibility-requirements
.

Tara Sun Vanacore and Abigail Barnes,
“Tainted: Why Gay Men Still Can't Donate Blood,”
Atlantic,
October 1, 2012.

Wikipedia
, “Gay Male Blood Donor Controversy.”

Mark A. Wainberg, Talia Shuldiner, Karine Dahl, and Norbert Gilmore, “Reconsidering the Lifetime Deferral of Blood Donation by Men Who Have Sex with Men,”
Canadian Medical Association Journal
, September 7, 2010.

Charlene Galarneau, “Blood Donation, Deferral, and Discrimination:
FDA
Donor Deferral Policy for Men Who Have Sex with Men,”
American Journal of Bioethics
10, no. 2
 
(February 2010).

Charlene Galarneau, “Review of Anne-Maree Farrell,
The Politics of Blood: Ethics, Innovation and the Regulation of Risk
,”
American Journal of Bioethics
13, no. 4 (April 2013). 

For information about how tainted blood products from an Arkansas prison made it into the blood supply in Canada and other countries in the 1980s, contributing to tainted blood scandals on an international scale, see the documentary
Factor 8: The Arkansas Prison Blood Scandal,
written, directed, and produced by Kelly Duda (Concrete Films, 2006).

Sophia Chase, “The Bloody Truth: Examining America's Blood Industry and Its Tort Liability through the Arkansas Prison Plasma Scandal,”
William and Mary Business Law Review
3, no. 2 (August 2012).

Justice Horace Krever,
Report of the Commission of Inquiry on the Blood System in Canada,
tabled in 1997.

André
Picard,
The Gift of Death: Confronting Canada's Tainted-Blood Tragedy
(HarperCollins Canada, 1995).

Steffanie A. Strathdee, Michael V. O'Shaughnessy, and Martin T. Schechter, “
HIV
in the Blood Supply: Nothing to Fear but Fear Itself,”
Canadian Medical Association Journal
, August 15, 1997.

Ruling by Judge Catherine Aitken, Ontario Superior Court of Justice,
Canadian Blood Services v. Freeman
, September 8, 2010, Court file 02-CV-20980.

Durhane Wong-Rieger, president, Canadian Association for Rare Disorders, interviewed on
Ontario Today
(
CBC
Radio), May 24, 2013.

Mexico lifted the ban on blood donations from men who have sex with men in 2012:
www.care2.com/causes/mexico-no-longer-bans-gay-men-from-donating-blood.html
.

Cheryl Wetzstein, “Study Could End Ban on Gay Men Donating Blood,”
Washington Times
, May 16, 2012.

“U.K. to Lift Lifetime Ban on Gay Blood Donors,”
Advocate.com
, September 8, 2011.

Peter Tatchell, the Australian-born U.K. activist on behalf of lesbian, gay, bisexual, and transgender people, argues on his website that the U.K. should accept blood donations from gay and bisexual males, provided that they always use a condom and test negative for
HIV
/
AIDS
:
www.petertatchell.net/lgbt_rights/blood_ban
.

This
Huffington Post
web page links to a
CBC
website and lists blood donation policies in twenty-one countries; Italy, Spain, and Mexico allow donations from men who have sex with men:
www.huffingtonpost.ca/2013/01/12/gay-men-donating-blood_n_2467103.html
.

Gillian Mohney, “FDA Ban on Gay Men as Blood Donors Opposed by American Medical Assocation,”
abc
News
, June 20, 2013. See:
http://abcnews.go.com/Health/american-medical-association-opposes-fda-ban-gay-men/story?id=19436366#.UefGcWT72Fd.

Art Caplan, “Opinion: Ease US blood supply shortage by lifting gay donor ban,”
nbc
News
, July 17, 2013. See:
http://www.nbcnews.com/health/opinion-ease-us-blood-supply-shortage-lifting-gay-donor-ban-6C10656162
.

PAGES 115–31: LANCE ARMSTRONG, BEN JOHNSON, AND PERFORMANCE-ENHANCING DRUGS

For questions and answers about blood doping, including details on the potentially serious side effects, see the World Anti-Doping Agency website, at
www.wada-ama.org/en/Science-Medicine/Science-topics.

Trent Stellingwerff, an exercise physiologist who works with the Canadian Sport Institute, answered my questions about the effects of exercise on bloodstream. He explained the ways that both legal techniques (such as training at altitude or in hot weather) and illicit approaches (such as blood doping) affect the blood and performance. Stellingwerff assists in the coaching of his wife, Hilary Stellingwerff, who is an international-calibre 1,500-metre runner. He also is part of a team advising elite Canadian marathoner Reid Coolsaet. See the website of the Canadian Sport Institute, at
www.csipacific.ca
.

Ex-professional cyclist Tyler Hamilton, a former teammate of Lance Armstrong in the Tour de France, offers a lively, informative look at blood doping and other forms of cheating in professional bike racing. Hamilton openly describes his own use of drugs and blood doping while riding with Armstrong. I drew quotes from pages 123 and 124 of Hamilton's book: Tyler Hamilton and Daniel Coyle,
The Secret Race: Inside the Hidden World of the Tour de France: Doping, Cover-Ups, and Winning at All Costs
(Bantam Books, 2012).

In June 2013, shortly before the start of the 2013 Tour de France (the first since Armstrong's admission five months earlier on television to Oprah Winfrey that he had taken steroids and
EPO
and undergone blood transfusions to cheat during his seven consecutive victories), Armstrong told
Le Monde
newspaper that during the time of his reign, it would have been impossible to win the race without resorting to drugs and doping. See Stéphane Mandard, “Lance Armstrong: Le Tour de France? Impossible de gagner sans dopage,”
Le Monde,
June 28, 2013, and Giles Mole, ed., “It Was Impossible to Win Tour Without Taking Drugs, Claims Lance Armstrong,”
Telegraph
(London),
June 28, 2013.

For a detailed presentation of Armstrong's cheating methods, as well as affidavits by Armstrong's former teammates, see the “Reasoned Decision” report by the United States Anti-Doping Agency:
Report on Proceedings under the World Anti-Doping Code and the
usada
Protocol: Reasoned Decision of the United States Anti-Doping Agency on Disqualification and Ineligibility:
United States Anti-Doping Agency, Claimant, v. Lance Armstrong, Respondent
, October 10, 2012, online at
http://d3epuodzu3wuis.cloudfront.net/ReasonedDecision.pdf
.

See the report of the formal inquiry struck after Canadian sprinter Ben Johnson tested positive for anabolic steroids at the 1988 Seoul Olympics and was stripped of his 100-metre world record and Olympic gold medal: Charles L. Dubin, Commissioner,
Commission of Inquiry into the Use of Drugs and Banned Practices Intended to Increase Athletic Performance
(Canadian Government Publishing Centre, Supply and Services Canada, 1990).

For details about events leading up to, during, and after Ben Johnson's 100-metre race at the Seoul Olympics, see Richard Moore,
The Dirtiest Race in History: Ben Johnson, Carl Lewis and the 1988 Olympic 100m Final
(Bloomsbury, 2012).

About the use of biological passports to detect blood doping or the use of performance enhancing drugs, see “Athlete Biological Passport,” on the World Anti-Doping Agency website (
www.wada-ama.org/en/Science-Medicine/Athlete-Biological-Passport
); Mario Thevis,
Mass Spectrometry in Sports Drug Testing: Characterization of Prohibited Substances and Doping Control Analytical Assays
(Wiley, 2010);
and Mario Zorzoli and Francesca Rossi, “Implementation of the Biological Passport: The Experience of the International Cycling Union,”
Drug Testing and Analysis
2, no. 11–12, 2010.