Call me. So we're going to start with a story about back I just heard his name was Barton Benish he was an artist working in New York in the West Village in Manhattan in the seventy's eighty's and early ninety's pretty successful and famously social Oh my God not by any means your normal terrorist I mean he was just the most charming welcoming open beguiling person you could possibly imagine although given the story we're about to tell he was also a bit of a prankster I deal with fear people's fears and he was nuts which was a lot of fun and by the way that is Barton's best friend Jo Jo love it director and producer we were very very close friends we talked almost every day the basis of Barton's art was stuff he he would find stuff and then describe it or mount it actually he had an enormous collection of stuff in his apartment. A welcome to the catacombs my 10 room mansion this is the cabinet of curiosities it was a magnificent place I did a film on it actually when you walk into it and I African collections it was filled with drawers of spider holes from Pamplona to totems even have an outhouse here desiccated animals beaded pieces of bears and wolves and birds in one drawer he had human ashes in another and that from the liposuction old poop 25000000 year old anything fossilized I mean anything you keep could find that was weird that's Laurel Roy one of Courtney's friends that was to for example in another cabinet he had Adolf Hitler's teaspoon a severed human toll and someone had been walking across was the Brooklyn of the Williamsburg Bridge and he called me up and he said I found a tow and they thought well Bart would be the person to give it to me and I'm off I had to kill or did people do bring you things so people sent him Madonna's underpants. Yes people sent him. Lipstick on a napkin from Texas I think somebody said him Sylvester Stallone. Urine. How do they collect that they cared so much about Barton that when peed in this year and all in a restaurant and didn't flush they went in. And although is apartment was filled with every different taboo button pushing weirdness that you can imagine the one area he didn't touch at least not at 1st was the thing that haunted his life the most I never knew what to do about eights it was a hard subject from the way you know I was positive and my boyfriend died and it was something I couldn't deal with and I could make art about it but then one day one day he was in his kitchen cooking he was a good cook and he always could put we came to visit I was in the kitchen cutting parsley and I cut a piece of my finger. He cut himself and. Blood went all over the kitchen and he went into his huge panic I was so freaked out. The story goes Barton immediately thought Oh my God I'm going to get aids. But then in the next blink you thought well wait a 2nd oh. I already have it it's my own body can't hurt. What he sort of forgot that he had it himself really I don't understand that this he had he had Aids Oh yeah he knew yet it's still the site of his own HIV infected blood his own blood was so viscerally terrifying to him that he ran out of the room I went and got rubber gloves and bleach and I thought this is nuts this is my brother and my kitchen and I'm going through all this craziness and that's when I thought if I have this fear you can imagine what other the fear that other people have. You know this is the very very beginning of the epidemic. In the early days we were just talking about this last night as a matter of fact. We had a friend who was hospitalized at New York hospital you know they left his tray at the door the medical people wouldn't go into they were scared to go in terrified and everybody was terrified I remember that they used to have these. Things on the door be where it's going 10 minutes because of the blood yeah it's hard to overstate just how frightening blood was in this moment nobody knew what anything was going on there conspiracy theories there are thoughts that people were being poisoned all anyone knew is that people were dying and it was because of something in the blood you hear about it happening to someone and then you'd hear about it happening to a friend of a friend and then it would happen to a friend and that it was your best friend and it was your other best friend your other best friend your mother this for me unbelievable. We must have lost. Easily half of our gay friends easily at so Barton I never knew what to do about Aids it was something I couldn't deal with when he cut his hand open in the kitchen sees blood freaks out and things like how there is a strange power to this but just the sight of it well he has an idea and I struck making these weapons. The idea sounded simple the series of works called lethal weapons except they weren't very lethal looking but he took a little toy gun a child squirt gun one of those candy yellow toy guns and he put his own blood in scientific scrutiny he had pacifiers with blood baby pacifiers with blood. You know nursing bottles with blood and one of those clown lapel flowers that squirt water while his blood atomizer is perfume atomizers with blood you go yes it does exactly now you couldn't really squirt yourself with his HIV infected blood because the work was put in these glass boxes but the invitation was clear. Squeeze me. I deal with fear people fear us. And this one is what he called a poison dart Joe has one of the lethal weapons in his living room but it's a hypodermic needle very thin and long that have been filled up with his blood many put these delicate little feathers from an African bird on the back of the needle to make it look like one of those poison darts from. An old James Bond movie. So Barton initially shows the work to Laurel who mounts an exhibition at her gallery in North Dakota and then then the show went to Sweden and that's where things got interesting. It was extraordinary that's triggered Hornberger she ran the gallery in London Sweden where the Lethal Weapon landed and she says within a day or 2 of the show opening the authorities who are here telling me to close the doors that by law they had to put the safety Oh people coming into the gallery we felt ashamed she thought this is London we're a university town we should know better but wait a 2nd did you know for a certainty that their fears were ridiculous No I mean. The virus doesn't go away that quickly in the beginning we were scared but we can't avoid fear in the world. So she told the authorities take it easy Don't do anything no one's going to get hurt the blood is behind glass but the other thing that happened is after the bad Flyers came out saying that we were selling. Contaminated blood by the liter. Flyers really in morning and evening news papers Wow didn't know what I think information came from must have come from the Health Authority but suddenly she says the whole town of learned exploded she had people coming into the gallery yelling this is not art How dare you and. Sell it for money what is this we were overwhelmed. So they struck a deal with the Health Authority a compromise they said All right here's what will do it will take the work and either work the cells will stick it in all then heat all of them up at 160 degrees Fahrenheit for 2 hours and that is so key let everything possible let's just say that's awesome. If you were the paper would curl or the the glass Well the plastic would melt in the office and then each for a catastrophic it say it was safe to sell. And never thought I would become a terrorist. That's what I became They called the aids harsh. Art So the interesting thing and if you folks ways and. Take over the last few decades aids has become a little bit less or. Just you know so you think like those lethal weapons pieces like that poison we saw in Joe's letter that it would lose its punch a little bit. After all these years that's what happens to a lot of political art after you take it out of its moment it just kind of fizzles right. That doesn't happen with that it's still think it's an extremely powerful piece and I think all those but pieces are and they're really they're really shocking about what took place the power now well I think I think blood is powerful and so when you look at Barton's blood pieces whether there are 8 blood or not there's still blood it's it's it's. It's take ring with a life force and he's right like you see that blood it's a man's visceral it's not just ard. That guy's gone so. It's kind of ghostly in a way we had a wonderful goodbye that's Laurel again he said I'm dying and I wish my friends would stop trying to manage it they tell me I have to can't drink and I can't do this and I can't do that and I said Well. Let's have a bottle of wine and we tranq a bottle that night and we talked about everything saying good bye but mostly laughing Laurel says that even at the end when using really bad shape. He was still like a little I hoped his point of view of the world was full of glee and delight and that's kind of maybe the thing that sneaks up on you in the end is that as you're looking at the blood it's scary and then suddenly. It's hilarious you're like oh no he's making a joke as if the thing that scares you most is also so absurdly frightening that you laugh at the same time yeah. But it kind of made himself sort of skinless in some way. It's a very generous offer to anybody who is receptive enough to take it so the man himself melts away and all we've got left is a patch of his blood that says boo and come laugh with me. Before we go to break big thanks to Kelsey Padgett for production help on that piece Hello this is the Bradley from North Augusta South Carolina Radiolab supported by offering a personalized weight loss program into the psychology of small roads the technology designed to help people change habits and keep the weight off at noon in Iowa that are. Tied hysteric more and I'm calling from Oxford Ohio Radiolab is supported by Indeed with indeed employers can post a job in minutes set up screener questions than 0 in on a shortlist of screen candidates using an online dashboard or info at Indy dot com slash hire. On the next fresh air we look at the bizarre world of insects and why we can't live without them and so far droops I guess Professor of conservation biology tells us why fruit flies are more useful than we think and how cockroaches could be vital to our survival Her book is called Buzz sting but join us. I'm Jeremy Hobson The world of lighting is changing fast with l.e.d. Technology leading the country into a more energy efficient future particularly for home and restaurant food that lighting can create makes a big difference that means that people will more readily adopt that technology shining a light on lighting technology next time on here now. There are several ways to leave prison. Some folk have half the town waiting for many others out of that day. And some people have no one at all. The next step to be special your hostile collaboration to sing the concrete snap judgment. Not this. Hey I'm Jad Abumrad I'm Robert crow it this is Radio Lab today blood test and this exploded $5000000000.00. For Shakespeare blood was blood. This is James Shapiro Shakespeare expert friend of our show and he says people back in Shakespeare's day were familiar with the sight of blood the feel of blood even the smell of blood and. But I mean young kid he grew up in Stratford and at 21 he went to London he came as an actor and probably is the youngest actor in the company what he was sent to do is to go to the shambles that's a slaughter house block and half away and get a bucket of blood so that when they do the Spanish Tragedy or any other I mean that using fake blood they using animal blood in all these plays they didn't use thing no it was fake but how do you get fake blood got to make fake blood you just walk 2 blocks on the way from where he lives to the theater he's going to pass some kind of slaughtering area I don't know how much it cost for a bucket of blood but you need a bucket of blood for Titus Andronicus you need a bucket of blood for Julius Caesar in had play Shakespeare has Mark Anthony say I stand upon slippery ground I mean that stage is covered in blood and he's slipping in this blood and all the men had just stooped and washed in Caesar's blood up to you know the elbow so there is blood in this play in all of the play the comedies the romances the histories all of them were blood itself occurs $673.00 times in $571.00 speeches in 41 of Shakespeare's plays and poems which means almost every play in Palm 37 times in King John Mark to Market Place and French ones. Not again which we live in. Temples 328 times in Richard the 3rd one raised in blood I want him blown I could. Lead up to broil 22 times in Henry the 4th and it was when I don't children's blood now means a lot of different things I mean I'm of good blood I'm of high social station and of course there was bad blood or curse of blood or being hot blooded or cold blooded and sometimes as in Macbeth It just means blah blah We'll have live I mean in blood Step 2 months ago. This stops the head space is all that's replied to silver screen laced with his golden blood he's waiting here he feels he is waiting in blood just think of that for a moment how Harra belief experience must be think of stepping into the ocean and it's blood. For most of us this is just a metaphor when I'm trying to say is for this culture blood was more then a metaphor. Blood was the thing that makes you you life death kinship ties and what is within you what circulates within you. Your character. So blood was like like essence. Of Shakespeare saw blood as like your essential nature Well this next story. Is about what happens when that idea. Collided with science. I we do it to sort through the debris of this collision we talked with science journalist. I met were gone with the author of the clockwork universe. A great read it opens right where our story begins so it's 1660 England it Shakespeare's century Isaac Newton is a brilliant young man but nobody knows him yet and one of the big deals of this era is that science is just starting out people are just beginning to tinker and fiddle with nature and in London much of this tinkering went on in a rundown mansion every 3rd Wednesday some schedule like that RINGBACK you would see this strange collection of being known as the Royal Society come coming into the Royal Society quarters where they liked it with the National Science Foundation of their day or just like a club Well it starts out as a club but what makes it a terrific club is that at the beginning there are essentially no rules so you have Christopher Wren and Robert Boyle which is to say Richard Feynman and Stephen Hawking. Then you have you have some amateur violinist who's got a theory that if you would if you tuned the violin some goofy way it would sound much better the next to him is a man with a potato in the shape of a unicorn is. Bringing these wonder just kind of her kind of thing people were thrilled at this time with experiments in general and it didn't have to be a lot of lighting fire crackers in in throwing ice in the fireplace to see if it cracks or makes a big annoyance or pump out the air from under a jar and put a mouse in it to see what happens any kind of experiment that that you can think of is going on because nobody knows how anything works. So almost every question you can think of was in some sense a question worth asking and one question which endlessly fascinated these guys lucky for us is a simple one what is blood because blood in this era. Is this Astonishing Substance. Everybody knew it was vitally important everybody had always known that since the 1st person to stab somebody else. But nobody knew what made it import nobody knew what it did. And it also had this this mysterious. Spiritual quality to it. In the same way that we have this notion of the brain in the mind and there are different things and one is physical when one is floating around in some more abstract way. The blood was this physical red stuff that dripped on your desk but it also carried some soulful essence that marks you as you into me as me. But how do you get at that this is this is an experimental question so here was the 1st experiment question number one what would happen if you took a madman. This mad fellow a guy who was prone to fits to carrying on to say that he took this guy and you fill them up with the blood of a sheep in a sheep is famously docile of course what would happen with that docile sheep blood get inside the madman. And tame him soothe his raging fits. So the Royal Society ransom adds can we find somebody to do this we'll pay you a guinea which is a few bucks today that is to say worth having but not a fortune and they're delighted to find this fellow Koga Arthur Koga because he's like the Mad Hatter or something like what we did we would these days calls gets a frantic I mean was he crazy in that way or just like eccentric The vocabulary is so different it's hard to know what he was in his day or are they one of those people you would edge away from he's the guy on the subway. In any case on the day of the experiment they bring Koga into the Royal Society and into the big theater there and it is a full room there are Wouldn't bleachers and everyone is crowded together on those bleachers jostling for position in the early comers get the best seats in the front of the room is a is a is a little table in the shop is on that table and they sit right next to the sheep the sheep is tied down and they live a tiny one right across. An artery in the sheep's neck in the army and Arthur Koger they have him put his arm on a towel you know you just cut open a vein of his and now they take a skinny little metal tube in they run it between the 2 so that blood goes from the sheep's neck into the man's arm and back and then. They weigh. And weigh. In way how long would you think you have to wait for a madman to become sheeplike in his personality change well I guess they had waited for him to West become from the table and. There is no buying there is no sun coming to his senses but nobody drops dead in that count as a success and I thought you know maybe we're just not getting at this the right way maybe there are some other experiment that if we did it properly we could find out the answer to this question what is in the blood that makes each person special and in fact. Around that time the eminent scientist of the day this great figure guy by the name of Robert Boyle proposed 16 experiments that they ought to do now there are no records of the experimental results but we can pretty much magine out when number one the blood of a cowardly dog put that into a fierce dog let's see if that makes the fierce dog or tame so they try that and that doesn't work Ok well but if you took a dog that has a fabulous sense of smell like a bloodhound and you put his blood into some ordinary dog who can find his way home will that dog suddenly have a fabulous sense of smell and not know you know that that didn't work Boyle tries variation after variation of this and to to cut to the chase none of them with any useful result. And it was around this time if you ask historians that are general thinking about blood. Began to shift RINGBACK. We stopped seeing blood is this magical thing there's no assets in there it's just. Biology really you know platelets proteins red blood cells at that's how is he blood now. In those experiments and 666 the experiments. Sound to us absolutely ludicrous of course they are except. They were on to something. All right so can you hear me yeah I can hear you but so recently our producer Lynn Levy found out about some research some new research the might make you think differently about those experiments back in 600 $66.00 right so I called up one of the researchers my name sawblade and I'm a faculty fellow here at u.c.s.f. So I just started my own lab you have your own lab is it like it's the the Saul lab it's the violate a lab yeah you're still pretty young right yeah I 32 so saw all those experiments with mice Ok And there's one thing that you need to know about mice just to understand this whole thing which is what mice really hate water. Thrown in the water they want to get out of their stress possible there's a classic experiment that scientists have been doing for a while there are a lot of variations The idea is that you take a big pool of water and you build a maze in it Water me you know it's a come out sized maze and then we actually put a platform in the pool somewhere under the water you know the mouse can't see it doesn't know it's there if you are a mouse and you stumble across this platform you're like oh I can totally use this to get out of the water which I don't like at all so I'm very excited about this platform because you can rest you can run. So why don't why do they do this to the mice the point is like you want to see how fast the mice can learn and remember where the platform is so it's like a Learning to us it's a learning and memory test and what you do is you keep dropping them into the pool over and over and you just see how long it takes them you know to learn where the platform is exactly so what you notice if you do it a lot this kind of experiment is that there's a pattern that emerges and it has to do with age a young animal gets it they figure it out much faster once they've done it a couple of times let's say after you know the 6 or 7 time that you drop them in there they're like straight stop Left Right got it they go straight to it but the old guys they don't do that so what does it look like if you drop an old mouse according to Saul no matter how many times you run an old mouse through the May no matter what you do them they're just not getting better so it's like. Do I go left here. Right I'm pretty sure it was right last time. Why did they make it like that it's really hard but that's where the blood came in. So Saul had an idea that was kind of similar to boils you know 350 years ago this is 716 or all the salt and actually know about any of those old experiments and I gave him a copy of the paper that's crazy I keep this anyway his new but old question was this What happens if you mix young and old but does you know just this fact learning and memory so one of the things he did was he took blood from an old mouse who's you know they're really bad at learning where the platform is and he put it into a young mouse who's really good just sort of to see what would happen and then we did all the tests you know drop them in the pool the whole thing and what happened well all of a sudden. They didn't much worse the young animal looked a lot more like an old guy suddenly this young malice was just like wandering around the maze all confused you know like an old mouse not quite as bad but pretty close no idea where he is no idea where the platform is all blood really did impair learning and memory Wow not crazy we know what what was blood doing the good question so we saw in his collaborators also did another experiment to get at that very question in this one there were young mice who got old blood but there were also old mice who got young blood they went both ways and at the end of the experiment instead of looking at behavior we looked at the brain to. See they were looking at a part of the brain that specializes in learning and memory and they were looking for a very specific thing brand new baby neurons. See when you're young as you learn things your brain makes lots and lots of baby neurons but as you get older. Not so much not so much so solemn as collaborators they took all these mice you know slice their brains real thin veneer the. A slice of paper and when hunting for baby so I counted all of these in a microscope race so literally with a little clicker I just so what you're clicking like every time you see a new line in there on the click click apparently when you zoom in on one of these little neurons they look like little trees really when you're looking at them so little tree. Like little tree. Like over hours and hours and hours until finally one night pretty late. There is I think like one or 2 in the morning he gets his 1st look at the results in a young animal it was about a 25 percent decrease in those baby neurons. Was it dramatically Oh yeah I I mean you could see it just by looking so it seems like somehow when he gave the youngsters this old blood the old blood was preventing baby neurons from forming now in the old mice Normally in an old animal you're hard pressed to find you know a handful of these cells but after the old guys had been filled up with this young blood. All of a sudden. We were getting. You know maybe 2 or 3 times as many Munir ons as we had seen before or 3 times as many and they looked better you know the they looked longer and they looked a lot more like the younger. Chad. Which if you're come a little clip. Stay away from me. That this mean what it sounds like it means like you know I get the young blood and suddenly I can finish today with my gloves and play keys are all in my right hip pocket Zameen instead of losing them in one train may be but we're not at all ready to say that this is really new stuff there's a lot more work that needs to be done before we know like really even what it means but they least sure that it is the introduction of the new blood that is the tree is the agent of change pretty sure because this isn't the only study there have actually been a bunch of studies in the past several years that have come out with similar results for different parts of the body like the skeletal muscle can repair itself better when there's young blood in the mix actually the heart there was a really recent study at Harvard. Amy wagers is one of the people who worked on it I went to visit her at her lab in Cambridge. Radio here and one of Amy's assistants Donica showed me this tiny little file this is really frozen this week so it had a protein in it that they got out of the blood a very special protein. Called 11 so you just open the freezer and it's like crust and ice and taking a little red box what he got that's what that's what it looks like 11 and just basically the purified protein. That we keep it minus 80 so they think that the the clear stuff in this vile it does something kind of amazing because when you get older your heart tends to get bigger which is not it's you don't want that it doesn't work as well you want to stay small so what these Harvard people did is they took these old enlarged mouse hearts and beat them in young blood and the shrunk back down to be like young heart size and they think that very important protein is is the mechanism that's the key. It looks like absolutely nothing except it's very much so you can see the president at the bottom that's a very important little thing in that file that looks like nothing that even generates many systems so. So that's the research being done in Boston right but then you talk to the guys to Saul and the guy he's working with they're looking at $600.00 proteins right now trying to figure out which one might be might be implicated or which ones might be implicated and if you were to talk about all the proteins in your blood if you include all the like splices and Little Ferry and proteins. There could be up to $100000.00 of them. And wow yeah says 100000 different agents and they're doing something yeah. We'd like to add that since we 1st reported the show there's been some new developments in young blood research as well as some companies doing young blood plasma transfusions on humans however however this is come under serious scrutiny from the f.d.a. Who deem the process unsafe and not effective just want to offer you that word of caution that while the research in this field is very exciting it's still preliminary there's a lot more work that has to be done before we can really draw any real conclusions . Foundation and public understanding of science technology in the modern world for information about. God or. It's Joel incur in Nova Scotia reveal of a supported by Progressive Insurance offering its home called Explorer designed to provide information about available home insurance options in one place more information a progressive dot com. Hi my name. For it by new. Program that you. And your banker help people and he. Knew and back home on. Sunday a look back at the mother hearings and forward to the Democratic debates a veteran of the CIA's counter-intelligence center wonders about the agency's role in the world of his to Scotland where they might vote to leave the u.k. After Greg said Angela Bassett on mothers and sons and we take a trip to see what it's like to foster a migrant child who's been separated from their parents lots to hear so listen to Weekend Edition from n.p.r. News. A national gathering of Muslims in politics and very few presidential candidates in attendance every time but we have to infuse. Democracy into the system it's always been met with challenges by some Muslim voters say they feel ignored ahead of 2020 that's next time on the take away from w n y c n p r I. New documentary looks at how Facebook and the political consulting firm Cambridge analytic influence the 26000 election what Cambridge I'm going to brag about having during the 2016 election was a 5000 data points on every voter So ask yourself do you know 5000 things about yourself or your loved ones I'm Sarah McCammon the filmmakers of the great hat on the next All Things Considered from n.p.r. News. And I'm Robert Krulwich This is Radio Lab And today. Blood and told we're going to get some pretty cool donnish today BUSY. All right so there are places in the country where people give a lot of blood like Minneapolis Minnesota or Columbus Ohio or there was a paper big here where if you go to a blood drive and we did a way into this state the phone number on there you're find a really comforting scene. People with busy lives taken a moment here to walk into a cubicle room sit down with some nurses 6 I don't know stick out their arms are you ready for the front part of the thing and and then I'll just mark your brain just to make sure you know exactly where I need to go sit in and save some lives some of that is super excited and around the time to look away again not like it was. Beautiful and have that going to hurt it did hurt yeah or sorry in one by one they drained their own blood sometimes a double dose you give double the amount they discuss Do you feel of Lucy all to help strangers they will never meet and if you ask these folks why do you don't you get the answers you expect in the hope for the well because I wouldn't you know it's selfish not cerate thing to do being healthy have a responsibility thought about a person and meet in the hospital my mom used to work in needle i.c.u. She always told stories about the babies that needed a blood transfusions and it always just made me think if like if I had a kid I would really want blood to be there for them to have blood. In the simple point is that giving blood. Is a gift right it's the most selfless thing he can do it's the most loving thing you can do to gift of life you can't give any greater gift than now that's a message we've gotten in the last half century but if you poke into it. As if with a big long needle and if that long needle is named Molly Webster. And certainly you'll find that the reality is way more complicated way more complicated Ok this is this is Gogol we should just say 1st of all that this whole story started for us with this guy look at Guildhall he's a long time newspaper reporter and now I'm retired and I write books and the story that you'll run into actually started back in the late 1980 s. What happened was we're Red Cross would come to our office to do blood drives and I literally was giving blood one day sitting in a chair with a needle in his arm and the blood was draining out of my arm into the bag and a very simple question popped into his head I wonder what happens to the stuff after you know it gets into this bag. Who knows why I was thinking this I certainly don't remember but I suggested to Craig stock my editor hey you know why don't we just do a little explainer about blood for a Sunday piece just a short little thing about what happens to the blood how it's process where it ends up he said Sure go ahead and so I called up the local Red Cross set up an interview with the executive director of the blood center there and I want to see this guy and the strangest thing happened. RINGBACK RINGBACK Before I could even ask any questions he stored it at me. Wanting to know why I wanted to know this stuff what was the purpose why was I coming after Red Cross. He was just extraordinarily defensive and for me as a reporter I mean my intent or going up and that's how it all started at that point what was supposed to be a nice little Sunday piece about the gift of life turned into a crazy story filled with hospital contracts Sastre teachings business and economics on the suitable is selling auction horrible awful assaults on cost money and racial enterprise I absolutely had moments. When I would sit back and say oh my god I can't believe this is going on what what's with what I tell you one second maybe 2 minutes but 1st you should know that historically there's always been like a tension in the way we think about blood tension Yeah so I'm going to rewind. When But this 1st being used it was during war times during World War one that Scott Carney he's the author of the book The Red market and it hit big business in the battle of Cambrai that was the very 1st time medics realized they could use preserve blood have on the battlefield at the ready any time they wanted it so you could keep your troops alive longer if you had blood available still the blood didn't last very long in the process of giving blood was pretty gruesome and painful but by World War 2 and into the Korean War we've gotten much better starring in transporting blood and giving blood was less painful which meant. People back home could get involved what happens is there are these massive ramp up so you can give these men the gift of life a pint of your blood to get blood to the battlefield the Department of Defense is calling for all Americans to roll up their sleeves for the 1st time you saw these amazing. Magazine advertisement you know showing a soldier on one knee holding his rifle and say he give his blood would you give yours That's Douglas Starr author of the book Blood an Epic History of Medicine and commerce in Britain there was this idea you know we're being bombed you know we want to do anything we can do to help the war effort now in the United States there was a voluntary donation system but there's also the say hey we're Americans let's make some money on it as well so what happened in the states is that you had these $2.00 systems you had the Voluntary Service Cross model and you also had these places that would pay you anywhere from $15.00 to $40.00 for your blood really yeah all over the country usually in the skid row's Skid Row shantytowns. Setting up these for profit blood centers and they're paying people for their blood. People call them booze for who's because they're often set up next door to liquor stores and sometimes instead of in money they would pay in chips redeemable at liquor stores so you can imagine the population they attracted according to one eyewitness account there were worms on the floor it was a dirty dirty business you know like your 1st college apartment it was just a really really bad place and probably worse than I mean. I know they forms on the floor I don't know where you're living sky but the worms weren't really the problem I mean on the one hand these paid places got a lot of blood the volumes were quite high but pretty quickly doctors and hospitals they started to notice that paid blood is lower quality than an altruistic giving blood because you're attracting people who are down and out might have disease a lot of infections a lot of hepatitis and if they were sick they'd still want to get paid so they'd lie about it prisoners were giving blood the state of Arkansas funded its whole prison system on blood tests and of course everybody from the blood bankers to clergy people are saying this is obscene there is something sacred about blood it's not a commodity it's a holy substance and so by the late sixty's the early seventy's people were saying no more paid blood we need to get rid of it all blood should be donated it should be given freely and it was partly about making blood safe but it was really about more than that in addition to just being safer and altruistic blood supply brings the society together because when you're giving blood out of all truism you are saying alternately I'm doing this for the society in general I'm doing it for the war and I'm doing it because I'm an American and that it has this other effect that that brings the whole nation together so today there's no more paid blood no paid blood so no money involved. Well kind which brings us back to you know I want to know how a little bit more about how this works and so after his conversation with the Red Cross guy Gil went out he got a list of all the blood banks in the country and he just started going down the list. I would call one a day or call 2 a day and ask them what do you charge for a unit of blood what do you charge Young Yeah this was one of the surprises it turns out right after they draw the blood if you ask the 2 feels warm because it's coming right out of your body. Right after they'll put it in a bag keep it on Ice package it up and they will sell that pint of blood to a local hospital so we do have different contracts with different hospitals different blood centers I believe right now it's like almost $300.00 a pint is what they sell it for that's really bad since I was thinking $5.00 Yeah you know which is a $300.00 is actually kind of like a rough average for most major cities right and theoretically the price at the hospitals pay the blood center is it's just to cover costs and there are a lot the salaries the bags the testing distribution business office public relations that's just a partial list that one former blood banker gave us but that's really what you want to understand you know when someone donates a pint of blood what does it cost to process that blood and then what do you turn around and sell it for and some of the places were shocked by the question some of them would say there's no way on earth we're going to tell you some of them would say oh you know we charge $40.00 you know so he he made a list on a legal yellow pad of all the different prices the blood banks would charge their local hospitals you might see at that time as low as low thirty's and as high as 70 bucks and he wondered you know why the variation some of that was explainable you know labor costs are higher in Los Angeles New York so that made sense but we. Where that got interesting was he says he just happen to be talking to some blood bank or burly guy from the Midwest maybe about prices and the guy just casually mentions that his blood bank actually gets way more blood than it needs you know they had a surplus and they told him what we do is you know we take that blood and we sell it RINGBACK RINGBACK RINGBACK to other blood banks we sell it to somebody who can't collect enough and I probably reacted like what. And that led him to call up a blood bank in a little town called Appleton Wisconsin. In Appleton the day that blood bank at the time was pulling in plenty of blood way more than they needed only a locally and I knew that Appleton had no trouble collecting plenty of blood and yet around the holidays the director himself was quoted in the local paper saying like oh gosh we can't collect enough blood you know we're pleading with you to come in and we've never had it so tough. And Bill basically asked the guy why are you saying this you're doing fine I did what any reporter would do I began to press him on some numbers he acknowledged that half of the blood they were collecting and Appleton was actually being sold to other blood suckers Appleton was taking a chunk of that bloods marking it up $10.00 a pint and selling it to I think it was a Lexington Kentucky I called Lexington Kentucky they were taking that blood taking out the platelets and then selling the red blood cells to Broward County Florida so I then called Broward and found out that Broward was marking it up 20 more dollars a pint and selling it to New York City which is always looking for blood they could never collect nearly enough blood basically what he discovered was that the whole gift economy of blood that was only on the bottom was dealing the direction of the bean right now it's nice and plump it was only down there an absolutely gorgeous vein and they're absolutely gorgeous you you do you do you do you soon as you moved up around it was a market. Blood was being bought and sold and marked up at every step of the way. And this was so we're talking late eighty's here this is yet laid in $8889.00 and is is still going oh yeah and it's huge huge business I looked at the Red Cross tax return yesterday just to refresh my memory when I was writing about them their blood business was a $500000000.00 a year business it's now a $2.00 or $2200000000.00 a year business and it's not just the Red Cross I mean the Red Cross does like half of the blood collections in the United States but there are small independent blood banks all over the country and we pulled some of their tax forms and they have revenues of 30000000 over there they're 70000000 over there some of them are 50000000 when I left the blood center we were at the time about. $90000000.00 a year Blood Center so. This this is Charles rule I have been in blood banking actually since about 1973 and more than any other guy we talked to he really gave us a feeling for the business side of the blood business especially in south Florida in South Florida in the eighty's and ninety's you had kind of an unusual situation because you had a bunch of different blood banks there was a program in Miami Dade there was one in West Palm Beach all these different programs competing for the same donors your money into supinate there would be some competition but you didn't think that you could ever see anything like South Florida. Things things became quite heated the heads of the blood banks attack each other in the press in the press and in the local stories yeah they got into crazy bidding wars over access to high school students the great school board war yes they accused each other of stealing donors underpricing their products in order to gain market share one morning I would go to work that's Peter Thomas who he was one of Casey rulz competitors and I would find that one of our hospitals had been visited by Casey and his team and they had given us notice that they were going to switch to k.c. That feels horrible Well it's business at a certain point the competition says Casey got so intense that I got a number of ugly phone calls from people saying well. We're going to bury you we're going to bury you. Case a call came from a New York Blood Bank Casey decided that the only way he could compete in Florida and the only way he could keep his blood from going bad was to take his blood up to New York sell it to New York hospitals at way below market value so we were undercutting the blood supplier in New York at that time and they didn't like that No but it worked we became known sort of as the golden arch to New York he eventually figured out that he could buy blood on the cheap from a place like say I don't know Iowa and sell it up the chain to New York so you really did become kind of a blood runner well how we called it arbitrage arbitrage Yeah it's exactly arbitrage isn't it we were arbitraging the units I mean that's in Wall Street that's like the most cutthroat of the cutthroat. Yeah but we're talking here about blood and do you throw it away or do you find a home for it Casey says if you hadn't done that he would have to pour that blood down the drain if you're running a Blood Center you have an obligation to make sure that the promise that you made to that donor is. Cild that your unit is going to go to take care of somebody who is sick throughout the blood banking industry I have yet to bump into somebody who wasn't motivated by that promise even the guy on the other end of the phone call who said I will bury you they motivations you yeah actually is a she. Really And here's the thing like a certain point I mean Molly I think you agree that like we start to feel kind of differently about this whole blood business blood system kind of stuff Molly do you agree with that I do agree I mean like we've talked to how many blood bank people have we talked to you know God. Yeah I have to say like these guys are not you know they're not that cutthroat Wall Street person like talking to and they're not like that I mean they're stuck with a reality that demands that they act in business like ways not to be intentionally naive here like I know businesses have to run like businesses but there's some part of that doesn't want blood to be a business it shouldn't be a business well I mean maybe you need to let go of that idea yeah I found like I kept reporting this and I kept saying Why did everyone keep telling me it was a gift if it's kind of this commodity that everyone's shuttling around why don't we just call it what it is we keep hiding behind this idea of a gift I would still donate I don't think I care you know maybe we need to let a little bit of that. Gift image go I mean there is something wonderful about giving and I think one of the touching things to see was how after 911 so many people rushed to give blood and after the Boston Marathon bombing so many people rushed to give lead unfortunately especially after 911 that was based on an old fashioned idea that no longer is valid and it may actually be harmful according to Douglas stark take 911 what happened after 911 is all the politicians said give blood the Red Cross kept saying giving blood but the people in the know the other blood banks are saying no no stop stop we can't use it you know I spoke to the head of the Blood Bank of New York Ground 0 he said as soon as I saw the plane hit the building I thought we're not going to be able to use that blood Wow they had huge lines all the facilities got overwhelmed all over the country a lot of the facilities ended up having to pour a lot of blood down the drain blood went bad but there was this other rebound effect in that is if you stood on line to give blood and the beat came out and said you know what go home we don't need you psychologically you feel that you've done your thing so 6 months later in the winter season during Christmas when they usually have lows they had historic lows because nobody would come out to give Oa because they're like oh we gave blood they were full Yeah I did my civic responsibility so the final stages we really do have to understand that this is a pharmaceutical that might be another way to think about blood I mean it's a drug it's not simply a gift that I can choose to give or not give It's a precious raw material and I'm the only one who has we are the only ones who have it and when it comes out yeah some people make some money on that and yeah they could definitely be more up front about that I wish they wore a little more transparent definitely. But I'm the only one who has this stuff. And when I stop to think about how powerful this drug this pharmaceutical really was. I kind of decided. Maybe I should do that in the really big make of this and how you're going to turn your head in the other side if you go on. And you're going to feel the pain and. Here. Producers are unwilling Molly Webster special thanks to Rachael Kohn The in and away and also Edward Scott and Jeff McCullough. Thanks for listening in the Mongolian grasslands droughts and harsh winters in recent years have killed livestock in the millions the United Nations wasn't sure how to respond because there was no human life lost so it's not the zest that they see and then we said no it's disaster because someone is losing to talk to levy to know how climate change is changing life in the world in Goliad on the next morning edition. This is w o u b public media w o u b f.m. Athens w o u c f.m. Cambridge w o u l f.m. Irons and w o u h f m j l a coffee and w o u z f m Sainz Ville stream us online at w o u b r g slash listen tell your smart speaker to play w o u b. From n.p.r. News in Washington d.c. This is Weekend Edition. I'm live Garcia Navarro good morning the president is attacking an American city and a black congressman that has been silent on the crackdown on pro-democracy protesters in Russia we'll have a report from Moscow and we'll hear from Baltimore Philip Mudd also joins us he was the deputy director of the CIA's Counterterrorist Center and the F.B.I.'s national security branch he has a new book out about counterterrorism in the post $911.00 world plus vulcanologist tussle over access to Pompei Don't they know it's next to a volcano and we'll look back at the album that helped launch beyond his career in Destiny's Child It's Sunday July 28th the news is coming up right now in this newscast. From n.p.r. News in Washington and Joel Snyder in Hong Kong police again using tear gas to disperse protesters the demonstrators gathered in the center of the city for a rally today a day after dozens were injured in clashes with police a b.b.c. Stephen McDonell was at that rally before the protesters began spilling into city streets a gathering in Central Hall calling for I'm not a pro-democracy rally Usually it starts with a sort of us peaceful gathering and then those whole hog fall.