• Choose a category
• All
• Classic-Fiction

By Root 1123 0

—that are ‘genetically informed.’ ” Normally, these don’t figure prominently when a person needs blood. Some people are born with unusual blood, however, and others develop it. For instance, patients who have received multiple transfusions may have accrued antibodies to these minor antigens. Over time these individuals become harder and harder to match with suitable blood. That’s where this specialized lab comes in. As Richard explained, the researchers obtain samples of blood from hospitals throughout Northern California and test and catalog these unusual antibodies, antigens, and proteins. The lab also houses a national rare donor blood registry and provides a round-the-clock consultation service for hospitals trying to hunt down rare blood.

“The thing about rare blood is, it’s rare, so people don’t need it very often. But when they need it, they need it now!” By means of demonstration, we stepped into a nearby room with a small rumbling fridge. Richard randomly pulled out a pouch of red cells and read off for me a sampling of its unusual markers: “So this unit is big C positive, little e negative, little c negative, big E—these are all different antigens, these are Rh—and this is Kell . . . big K and little k; Duffy a, Duffy b; Jk(a) and (b), M, N, S, Lutheran, and Kinney!” Had I not glanced over the list, I’d have thought he’d made up some of those last ones. But no, this specific blend will likely be called for today, he predicted, and within hours will be coursing through someone’s bloodstream.

While at any given moment a small number of fresh units are available, the bulk of the center’s inventory is frozen. A quick walk took us to the deep freeze, a dim room dominated by eight coffin-style industrial freezers. You could probably fit several bodies into just one, I figured, and in fact the eleven hundred units stored within each do add up to about twenty quarts of blood, or four bodies’ worth. Richard creaked open the hood of the closest vault. Iced-over metal containers the size of clipboards were arranged like hanging files. Inside these, he explained, the cells are a thin red crust. When a hospital requisitions a unit, “It is thawed in a seawater bath at body temperature”—which struck me as a lovely way to emerge from so harsh a hibernation. Next, the “antifreeze” is removed, leaving the red cells ready to be shipped and transfused. The sell-by date for deep-frozen blood has yet to be established, Richard noted. Ten years is the industry guesstimate, but, he ventured, “It probably is almost good forever.”

As Richard steered me back to where the tour had begun, I marveled at the support structure in place here within this enormous stretch of a building: a staff of 350, a thirty-million-dollar annual budget, a steady hum of technology, all devoted to sustaining these small bags of fluid and readying them for their eventual return to circulation. While I’m sure it wasn’t Richard’s intent, my witnessing the effort expended on blood’s behalf actually left me more in awe of what the center tries so hard to replicate, the perfect packaging of the human body.

Back in the collection area, one such specimen sat within the contour cushions of the blood center’s latest high-tech toy, the e-chair. Richard said in the quiet voice of golf commentary, “This is the wave of the future.” He gently pulled me off to the side so we wouldn’t be hovering too close to the young Latino donor. The e-chair, Richard explained, is a six-months-new machine that, in one sleek apparatus, performs all the tasks of the Component Lab. It does this by extending the circulatory system by a few feet. The donor’s blood passes through tubing that disappears into a chairside contraption, about the size of a two-drawer filing cabinet. Inside is a whirring centrifuge. The wonder of this machine, Richard said, is that you can program its computer to harvest only the specific cells you need. The unneeded blood is then neatly transfused back into the body through a second tube. The technical name for this process is apheresis, which sounded to my ear like