In 1930, blood had a shelf life of a few days. If you needed a transfusion on a battlefield — with bombs falling and no donor available — you died. That was the state of medicine when Charles Richard Drew began his research at Columbia University. By 1940 he had changed it permanently.
Drew was born June 3, 1904, in Washington, D.C., the eldest of five children. His father was a carpet layer. His mother had trained as a teacher. He grew up in the Foggy Bottom neighborhood and attended Dunbar High School, where his athletic gifts were evident early — swimming, football, basketball, track. He lost his sister to tuberculosis while still in high school. That loss drove him toward medicine. In 1922 he earned a football and track scholarship to Amherst College in Massachusetts, where he was one of only 13 Black students in a student body of 600. He graduated in 1926, taught biology and coached football at Morgan College in Baltimore for two years while saving for medical school, then enrolled at McGill University in Montreal — Howard University had rejected him for being two credit hours short in English. He graduated from McGill second in his class.
After completing his medical training, Drew joined the faculty at Howard University and Freedmen’s Hospital in Washington. In 1938 he received a Rockefeller fellowship to pursue graduate work at Columbia University in New York. There he immersed himself in the problem that had defeated medicine for decades: how do you keep blood from spoiling?
His doctoral thesis — Banked Blood: A Study on Blood Preservation — solved it. Drew discovered that plasma, the liquid component of blood separated from the cells, could be preserved for two months longer than whole blood through a process of separation and reconstitution. Plasma has no blood type — it can be given to any patient regardless of their blood group. It can be administered intravenously or intramuscularly. It is easier to transport and store. In a battlefield situation it is ideal. Drew earned his Doctor of Medical Science degree from Columbia in 1940 — the first African American to receive that degree. He was 36 years old.
The timing was not coincidental. Europe was already at war. In the summer of 1940, as German bombs fell on Britain, Drew was named Medical Director of the Blood for Britain project — an ambitious effort to collect, process, and ship plasma across the Atlantic to treat wounded British soldiers and civilians. He developed a system to collect blood from multiple hospitals, convert it to plasma in standardized one-liter units, test each batch for contamination under controlled conditions using centrifugation, ultraviolet light, and antimicrobial agents, box it six units to a case, and ship it. The project collected nearly 15,000 donations and sent more than 5,000 liters of plasma to Britain. It worked. It saved lives. It established the model for every blood banking operation that followed.
In February 1941, Drew was appointed the first director of the American Red Cross Blood Bank — the first national blood bank in the United States. He also invented the bloodmobile — a mobile donation truck with refrigeration — that made large-scale collection possible outside of hospital settings. Between 1941 and 1950, more than half of all Black surgeons practicing in the United States had trained under him. He became the first African American examiner on the American Board of Surgery in 1943. The NAACP awarded him its Spingarn Medal in 1944 for the highest achievement by an African American. He was, by any measure, one of the most consequential medical figures of the twentieth century.
The number of people alive today because of blood banking — because of the system Drew built, the standards he set, the plasma preservation techniques he developed — cannot be counted. It runs into the tens of millions.
He died at 45. The full accounting of what he might have contributed beyond that is a loss that also cannot be calculated.