Charles Drew

Charles Richard Drew was born on the third of June 1904 in the Foggy Bottom district of Washington, D.C., the eldest of five children. His father, Richard Thomas Drew, was a carpet layer who served as financial secretary of the Carpet, Linoleum, and Soft-Tile Layers Union — its only non-white member — and his mother, Nora Burrell, had trained as a teacher. A gifted athlete and scholar at Dunbar High School, Charles carried both gifts to Amherst College, from which he graduated in 1926.

Determined to practise medicine, he studied at McGill University in Montreal, earning his medical degree in 1933. He continued his training at Columbia University, where in 1940 his doctoral thesis, "Banked Blood: A Study in Blood Preservation," made him the first African American to receive the doctorate of medical science from that institution.

Drew's research proved that blood plasma could be preserved and stored far longer than whole blood, transforming battlefield and civilian medicine alike. In the early years of the Second World War he organised and directed the blood-plasma programmes that supplied Britain and then the United States, work for which the NAACP awarded him its Spingarn Medal in 1944. He resigned in protest when authorities insisted on segregating the blood of Black donors — a policy he condemned as unscientific and unjust. As a teacher at Howard University he trained a generation of Black surgeons; between 1941 and 1950 more than half the Black surgeons in the nation had studied under him.

On the first of April 1950, travelling to a medical conference in Tuskegee, Alabama, Drew died of injuries sustained in a car accident near Burlington, North Carolina. He was forty-five. His science endures in every blood bank on earth, and his name is honoured wherever a life is saved by the gift of another's blood.