Charles R. Drew

Charles Richard Drew (June 3, 1904 – April 1, 1950) was an American surgeon and medical researcher. His work focused on blood transfusions, where he created better methods for storing blood and used that expertise to set up large-scale blood banks early in World War II. This work helped medics save thousands of lives among Allied forces during the war. As the most prominent African American in his field, Drew objected to the racial segregation of blood donations, arguing it had no scientific basis. He resigned from the American Red Cross, which kept the segregation policy in place until 1950.

Drew was born in 1904 into a middle-class African-American family in Washington, D.C. His father, Richard, worked as a carpet layer, and his mother, Nora Burrell, had trained as a teacher. Drew grew up with three of his four younger siblings (two sisters and one brother) in the largely middle-class, interracial Foggy Bottom neighborhood. As a young boy, he worked as a newspaper boy, delivering over a thousand newspapers daily to neighbors. He attended Dunbar High School in Washington, known for its equal treatment and opportunities for all students despite the racial climate. From 1920 until his marriage in 1939, Drew’s permanent address was in Arlington County, Virginia, though he graduated from Dunbar in 1922 and lived elsewhere during that time.

Drew earned an athletics scholarship to Amherst College in Massachusetts, where he played football and ran track and field, graduating in 1926. To save money for medical school, he spent the next two years (1926–1928) as a professor of chemistry and biology, as well as the first athletic director and football coach at Morgan College, a historically black private school in Baltimore, Maryland. For medical school, he applied to Howard University, Harvard Medical School, and McGill University. Lacking some prerequisites for Howard, and with Harvard wanting to defer him a year, Drew chose to start immediately at McGill’s medical school in Montreal, Canada.

During his medical training, Drew worked with John Beattie, who was researching possible links between blood transfusions and shock therapy. Shock happens when the body’s blood volume drops rapidly, due to wounds or dehydration. As shock sets in, blood pressure and body temperature fall, reducing blood flow and oxygen to tissues and cells. It became clear that transfusions could treat shock, but at the time there was no good way to transport or store blood in large amounts, so transfusions were limited by location. At McGill, Drew was inducted into Alpha Omega Alpha, a medical honor society, ranked second in his class of 127 students, and earned his Doctor of Medicine and Master of Surgery from McGill’s Faculty of Medicine in 1933.

Drew’s first faculty role was as an instructor in pathology at Howard University from 1935 to 1936. He then joined Freedman’s Hospital, a federal facility linked to Howard, as an instructor in surgery and an assistant surgeon. In 1938, he began graduate work at Columbia University in New York City on a two-year Rockefeller fellowship in surgery. He earned a Doctor of Science in Surgery at Columbia, conducting research at Presbyterian Hospital and writing a doctoral thesis titled “Banked Blood: A Study on Blood Preservation,” based on a thorough study of blood preservation methods. Through this research, he discovered that blood plasma could be preserved two months longer by separating the liquid plasma from the blood cells. When needed, the plasma could be reconstituted to its original state. This thesis earned him a Doctor of Science in Medicine in 1940, making him the first African American to do so. The District of Columbia chapter of the American Medical Association admitted only white doctors, so Drew died without ever being accepted into the AMA.

In late 1940, before the U.S. entered World War II and just after earning his doctorate, Drew was recruited by John Scudder to help set up and run an early prototype program for blood storage and preservation. He applied his thesis work to aid in preserving and transporting blood. His task was to collect, test, and ship large amounts of blood plasma to the United Kingdom. Drew understood that extracting plasma from blood required both centrifugation and liquid extraction, each done under controlled conditions to prevent contamination. Air concealment, ultraviolet light, and Merthiolate were all used to reduce the risk of plasma contamination. Drew went to New York City as the medical director of the U.S. Blood for Britain project. There, he helped set standards for hospitals donating blood plasma to Britain, ensuring clean transfusions and proper aseptic techniques so that viable plasma could be sent. The Blood for Britain project aimed to aid British soldiers and civilians by providing U.S. blood to the United Kingdom. Drew created a central location for blood collection where donors could go to give blood, and he made sure all plasma was tested.