James Harrison could not bear to look at the needle. He stared at the ceiling, at the stains on the wall, at the nurses, at anything except his own arm. And yet, for more than five decades, he returned to the clinic every week or every two weeks.
It all began at age 14, when major chest surgery forced him to receive 13 blood transfusions. Without them, he would not have survived. His father explained to him what those anonymous donors had done for him, and Harrison made a decision he would keep until he was 81 years old.
What no one could have foreseen was that his blood would turn out to be extraordinary: his body produced unusual amounts of an antibody capable of protecting fetuses from hemolytic disease of the newborn, a blood group incompatibility that, before anti-D treatment, killed one out of every two diagnosed babies. Each of Harrison’s donations saved the lives of more than 2,000 newborns.
He made 1,172 donations in total. Among the babies who survived thanks to his plasma were two of his own grandchildren. He died on February 17, 2025, at the age of 88, in his sleep. “There is a little bit of me in every donation”, he once said. It was not a metaphor.