Welcome to Stuff You Should Know, a production of iHeartRadio.

Hey, and welcome to the podcast.

I'm Josh and there's Chuck and it's just us And that's okay because we're gonna get bloody here on this episode of Stuff you Shouldn't Know.

I just had a cockroach crawl over my barefoot.

I've got a cockroach story for you.

First of all, how are you doing?

Be okay with that cockroach experience you just had?

It's it's not my favorite thing.

Secondly, why are you barefoot?

We're working?

Oh?

You know, I don't put on cheese onless I have to.

Thirdly, you want to hear my cockroach story?

Uh?

Yes, Although I will quickly say that's not the worst.

The worst cockroach story I've ever had is when I saw one as I was turning out the light fall from a ceiling above my bed.

And then the light went off, and then.

Right you heard the cockroach go nighty night, what's yours?

It just happened today.

I don't know if this is my worst or not.

It's pretty bad.

I went to go pour coffee from our coffee pot and a roach spilled out along with the coffee into my mug.

It was like in the port, the top that you can take off.

He was in the little spout.

Apparently.

I just remembered I had the worst one, because I think this tops yours.

I drank a cockroach in some red wine one time.

That's the worst one.

There you go.

Could you feel it crawling around in your gullet.

Just swimming through the red wine in my mouth?

And I just said it was And I'm sure everyone just heard me stomping in the back.

Tell me you didn't, Dude, you want me.

To get up in the middle of a recording and save a cockroach, I'd wait, Yeah, no, I don't save cockroaches.

I don't feel bad about it either.

We've talked about this before.

I think please tick, mosquitoes, cockroaches, everything.

Always on fleas, ticks and mosquitoes.

I'll leave alone.

I know you've claimed that many times.

We all know you're better.

I saw a cartoon.

It was it was the Annual Meeting of Insects people like, and they switched to the next panel and it was just a butterfly sitting alone at a conference table.

That's cute, but you know, you can't save the cockroach if they just crawled into the cup.

I might think about it, but they don't.

Okay, I disagree.

I try to get them with a paper towel, lightly pick them up and throw them outside and say, Sionara.

Sure they suffer no damage?

Probably not.

They're pretty tough.

Okay, this one was all right, let's get let's get that's terrible.

Let's get to this episode because this is a profile in courage and heroism of an everyday guy who found out he was a little more special than the rest of us and he put it to good use.

Inness that's right, James harris Son.

Is that?

Am I saying that correctly?

I think so.

Australia's own James Harrison, who is probably the most prolific blood donor in maybe human history.

He donated blood one and seventy three times over a sixty year period and is credited with saving the lives of two point four million babies.

Yeah, referred to as the man with a Golden Arm.

And we need to back up a second.

You can either pause and go listen to our episode on blood types.

That was a live one, right, I think so, or.

You can listen to a quick explanation of what RH disease is and what our AH incompatibility is because when you have a blood type you've you've heard now we know that you can be like positive or negative, like oh positive, oh negative?

That negative or positive is your r H factor so named after the the r H reesis monkey inadvertently not correctly named.

And so that's a rh factor.

That's it's a protein found on the outside of your red blood cells and then you either have it or you don't.

It's an inherited thing.

R eighty five percent of babies that are born or are H positive, which means they have that protein, but you either have it or you don't, and that becomes incompatible when it doesn't match up with what your mom has.

Right, Yeah, that's a real problem because if your mom is RIGE negative, meaning she doesn't have those proteins, her body's never been exposed to those proteins.

So when she has a baby developing in her stomach her womb I guess you'd call it, and some of those red blood cells across the placental barrier, her body flips out.

It's like, what is this?

We need to create some antibodies to attack this, and those antibodies attack the red blood cells, the protein on the red blood red blood cells, the rh factor and and tear them apart.

And that is not what you want happening to your feet as well.

It's developing in your room.

No, it's not.

And just to be clear, it's not it's not a problem at all to have a negative blood type.

Is just this incompatibility in pregnancy is a problem.

And on the first pregnancy this can happen and everything is likely going to be okay.

It's the subsequent pregnancies that are the issue.

And so to prevent this from happening, the pregnant person is giving immunoglob globulin.

I have such a hard time saying that.

And that's that prevents those antibodies from forming and attacking.

And it's a it's a done in the way of a plasma injection called anti d right.

And the reason why the first birth is okay is because the mom's body is still generating antibodies because again these are brand spank and new for her immune system.

And so when the first baby comes out, her immune systems like, yeah, that's right, walk away, walk away.

And then when the second baby comes it's ready, and that's when it really becomes a problem and it can result in and very frequently results in stillborn babies newborn deaths as well.

So if it wasn't bad enough, just add dying babies to it and it suddenly becomes much more urgent.

And it's not that rare either as the thing.

Yeah, I mean, they didn't even know about this until nineteen thirty nine, the RH factor.

Before that, it was just the ABO system.

But there was a woman who had given birth to a stillborn baby, was given a transfusion from her husband and had an adverse reaction despite having a matching blood type.

So that's when scientists figured it out, like, oh hey, there's another factor here, and it's this negative and positive RH factor.

And another Australian, a guy named John Gorman, a doctor, was working in blood banking, and this was in nineteen fifty eight.

He said, hey, I think that if we give these mothers an RH antibody, they wouldn't make any of that antibody themselves.

So it's kind of like a weird reverse treatment.

Right, Yeah, And it's really worth saying it's weird because they don't know still to this day, exactly how it happens or how it protects developing fetuses infants.

They think the best guess is that these antibodies that they consider passive antibodies, they don't attack the red blood cells of the developing child.

Instead, they actually attached to it an active protective bayer layer, essentially like obi Wan saying to the mom's immune system, these are not the red blood cells that you seek, not the factor that you're interested in.

Beat it, in the words of Obi Wan, like I said.

So, doctor Gorman and his research partner they tested this idea out on prisoners, on male prisoners at Sing Sing Prison in New York, injecting that RH negative into them with anybodies and then measuring the response, and they found that at worked and that it was safe.

Obviously not the most ethical thing theoretically, I guess these were volunteers, but you know how that goes.

But the question still remained, like will it save a baby?

And it turns out that his sister in law, Kath was a nurse and was RH negative and his brother, her husband, was RH positive, and they were like, hey, will be the guinea pigs in this one.

Let's do it.

Yeah.

So the problem was is that John Gorman's brother and sister in law.

Kath and Frank lived in London at the time, and Gorman, like you said, was in America even though he was Australian.

It's a brain buster, I know.

But the upshot of it is that Gorman sent this anti d inoculation essentially that he was testing out to the Gormans in London.

They had to go to Heathrow to pick it up.

John Gorman had to get it to them so quickly.

He didn't even fill out paperwork.

He just sent it like it was yeah, I don't know, like a deodorant, a push pop or something like that.

Push, yeah, deodorant great.

And they had to go to Heathrow to pick it up.

That's how time urgent this was, and if there was, if it wasn't urgent before, it was when they got to Heathrow, because Kath went into labor when they were picking up this injection.

Yeah, so they were somehow managed to talk this doctor into administering this treatment, which that's probably the most surprising thing that this doctor went along with it, but that doctor did, and Kath Gorman had a healthy son, and then she had another healthy son a year later after giving this injection and they were like, hey, it worked, and now it's given to women in the twenty eighth week of pregnancy and if the baby has found out to be RH positive, given again within seventy two hours of giving birth.

Yeah.

I think one of the other things that stood out to me about Katherine Frank Gorman's story is that the doctor who gave them the injection was persuaded to do so also by a team of a rival team from Liverpool who were also working on some sort of antidote to RH factor disease.

So they basically said like, this is actually going to launch John Gorman into the lead here, even though we're competing to come up with this, but seriously, you should you should inject her with this.

It's going to be great.

Yeah.

So they put saving babies before their own career.

That's great.

Yeah.

I think Gorman ended up saying that it was the most cost effective drug ever produced in fifty years.

There have been no fatalities from this treatment, and he said it saves about a billion dollars every year by preventing high risk RH pregnancies.

Yeah, so it was really something.

The thing is, you still need to this day human blood to make the anti d immunoglobin.

Yeah, globulin, it is hard to say, chuck, yeah, inoculation.

Yeah, plasma technically yeah.

Yes, And this is where James Harrison comes in.

But he doesn't come in yet, dear people, because you were going to have to pay through the nose to get to him by listening to these commercials.

Okay, everybody, thanks for listening to those commercials.

We're back and it's time that we really introduce you to James Harrison.

He was an amazing guy, but I feel like we should go back to before he was a full guy, when he was just a fourteen year old, because he to win a really big time surgery and I could not find out why, but he had to have an entire lung removed again at age fourteen.

Yeah, there's not a lot about the guy.

Even when you Reada's obituary, the just details are scant, and I sort of feel like he probably wanted it that way as a kind of a low key awesome dude.

But yeah, at fourteen, he had a lung removed.

He was in the hospital for three months and during that time he required almost two gallons of blood, thirteen units of donor blood, a human adult has about ten units of blood, so a fourteen year ol wouldn't even have that much.

So basically a full plus transfusion of his blood that saved his life and comes out of it as a fourteen year old, and his dad explains what happened, and he's like, I know my calling, Like when I come out of this and I'm able to be old enough to give blood and plasma, like that's what I'm going to do with my life.

Yeah, his dad was already a blood donor too, so I'm I'm sure it was gratifying for him and James Harrison.

I guess he had to wait a few years before he was eligible to donate blood, but once he did, he started doing it right off the bat, right when he could.

But it took another eleven years.

I guess when he was in his early thirties, he has something like that, we're about to be thirty before the doctors were like, hey, hey, this guy's something special.

He's got some dynamite plasma because they think when he got all of that blood he was RH negative, but he got a lot of RH positive blood and his body started making RH positive antibodies that can just knock your socks off.

So this guy, James Harrison, when he was fourteen, essentially acted inadvertently as a human test tube or Petrie dish where they put together RH negative and RH positive, shook it up, and this guy started making antibodies for the rest of his life that would go on to save baby Yeah.

I mean, his stuff was so good and he was so prolific and dedicated, and we'll talk more about that.

There was a doctor that said in the Sydney Morning Morning Herald in twenty eighteen that every ampuel of anti d ever made in Australia has James in it.

Yeah, primo stuff.

Pretty cool.

So the two point four million babies he saved not an exact number obviously, but they basically did a calculation where they analyzed birth data from nineteen sixty four moving forward, accounted for the people who got this antid treatment, and then weighed overall mortality risk from RH disease and came up with that number two and a half million babies.

Yeah, because I mean, when you donate blood, you do save lives, but you don't necessarily save babies lives like James Harrison was a baby saving machine, that's right.

They tried a synthetic version, but they're still not there yet, so they they're still reliant on people, you know, donating their blood and plasma.

But the synthetic that they've been working on it they call it James in a Jar, which is kind of cute.

As well, right for sure.

So, like you said, it is kind of tough to find much about James Harrison's life other than his blood donation.

Laura Claus and doctor Claw helped us with this one, and she found out that he was a clerk in the Regional Railway Authority and his wife, his beloved wife, Barbara, who died in two thousand and five, was a teacher and Harrison's dedication was such that when they went on vacation.

Whenever they went on vacation, they would putts around Australia in a camper.

He would find the closest blood donation clinic and go donate blood.

And the reason why he did that so often was because with plasma donations, your body regenerates the plasma so quickly, I think within forty eight hours that in some cases, in some countries, you can donate plasma couple of times a week rather than the I don't.

I can't remember.

It's several weeks, if not a month or more that you have to wait to donate whole blood like the regular kind.

Yeah, I mean you have to wait two weeks for plasma even But he wanted to donate so frequently they would been the rules and like they said that, he would come in at day like ten and eleven sometimes and be like, come on, just take my plasma.

I'll be fine, And they did oftentimes.

And they don't get paid for it.

You can get paid.

It's a sort of a I don't know how common it is, but it's an old trick if you're really broke and can't make rent to sell plasma in the United States, because you can get paid for donating plasma.

But he didn't get paid for any of this either.

No, we should also say if you've never donated plasma, but you've donated blood, it's it's slightly different.

Donating blood can take fifteen minutes.

Maybe donating plasma is a whole thing where they take your blood out just like they do with whole blood, and then they run it through a machine that separates the plasma from the platelets and the red and white blood.

Cells and returns the red and white blood cells to you, and the whole process takes about an hour rather than a quarter of an hour, and it has all the other stuff the lead up in the recovery that a whole blood donation takes.

So when you take that into account, James Harrison making these donations, it's just even that much more removal worthy.

Yeah, Like, I mean one of these guys said, it's like a half a day basically when you count in travel and all that.

Yeah, so if he donate, you know, let's say that's like four hours, and if he donated you know eleven, I mean how many times?

Was it eleven hundred plus?

Yeah, Like that's just thousands and thousands of hours of his life where he's trying to donate even more frequently, Like, hey, it's been ten days, get me in there, I'm ready for sure.

I'm sure.

His coworkers were like, oh, James gets to take a four hour lunch break every couple of weeks, and his supervisors like, let me tell you about James and what he's doing with this four hour lunch.

Exactly, you like, saving babies.

Right.

So he and his wife, Barbara had a daughter and two grandchildren, and the daughter was an anti DE recipient herself, and she made a big statement after he died as an ANTID recipient myself, he has left the family behind that may not have existed without his precious donations.

And I believe a granddaughter in law, Rebecca Mellowship, also got the anti D treatment.

So he even furthered his own family by helping out his daughter and granddaughter in law.

Yeah, I guess he had four great grandchildren when he died this past February in twenty twenty five.

Yeah, and yeah, like she said, like you can make a really good case that these people would not necessarily exist without him donating a very special plasma.

And this was like not, It's not like his family wasn't aware of this, Like this is a big celebrated thing, not just with his family but in Australia.

And so his grandson Scott turned sixteen and said, I want to join the family racket and start donating blood too.

So the first time he gave blood, he went with his grandfather took him with him, and so Scott's first time was his grandfather's one thousandth donation too, and apparently the whole family donates blood, which I mean imagine being the one family member who was like, no, I don't feel like it.

Never everybody, oh man.

Is donating it.

But you know there's one you know, there's.

One family shame.

His wife passed away, Barbara, in two thousand and five, so very dark times for him, and he pressed through and did not let that disrupt his donation schedule.

So for the last twenty years of his life as a widower, he he you know, kept giving that stuff, even though he hated needles, he hated the sight of blood, and he had a very low threshold for pain.

Yep, there it is our O Henry style ironic twist.

Yeah, the man who he gave blood one and seventy three times to save two point four million babies was afraid of.

Needles, that's right.

And he had a favorite arm too, right.

Yeah, his right arm.

He said at some point that he feels like he even admitted it could be placebo effect, but he can feel them injecting the ivy into his left arm, but he doesn't feel it in his right arm.

So out of those eleven hundred and seventy three times, only about ten were in his left arm.

Yeah, should we take a break.

We should, all.

Right, We'll take a break and finish up right after this.

All right, So we're back to talk a little bit more about the dedication of James Harrison, the most prolific blood donor in plasma donor in history, even in his older years, because he gave until he was eighty one.

In twenty eighteen, I finally said you got to stop, and he didn't want to stop, but they're like, you know, for your own health, you can't keep doing this.

But up until that point, he would ride the train an hour each way to go to this donation center that was the closest one, or at least that was the regular one that he became accustomed to.

And he was really broken up.

He said, it's a sad day for me, the end of a long run.

I keep going on if they let me.

And this is just I have a hard time even getting through the sentence.

But the last time he gave the blood, he was surrounded by moms and babies that he had saved.

Yeah.

Incredibly, pretty amazing.

Yeah, apparently even though he was something of a celebrity at least that blood blood banks in Australia, I think, well, beyond that too.

He was very unassuming in that he never walked in, you know, wearing sunglasses and a scarf.

And then with the Golden arm is.

Here exactly and just wearing his jacket over his shoulders.

Right.

Yeah.

He instead would just kind of chitchat other people who are giving donations and kind of telling them like, hey, you're doing something great.

But he didn't say and I should know because I'd saved two point four million babies.

He was not that kind of person.

I feel like this would be a different episode if he had been that kind of person.

It'd still be worth talking about, but maybe less celebratory.

I don't know, but this guy doesn't seem to have really been bad at all in any way, shape or form, and we really looked.

Well, here's a couple of quotes.

It becomes quite humbling when they say, oh, you've done this, or you've done that, or you're a hero.

It's something I can do.

It's one of my talents, probably my only talent, is that I can be a blood donor and that saving one baby is good.

Saving two million is hard to get your head around.

But if they claim that's what it is, I'm glad.

To have done it.

You just imagine every one of these quotes.

He's got his hands in his pockets and he's just kind of kicking around some pebbles with his feet looking down.

Yeah, I'm gonna get a shirt that says what would James Harrison do?

Right man?

One of my favorite shirts of all time is that what would Jason Do?

It's like a hockey mask instead of the Jay.

That's funny.

Just the implications behind the whole thing make it even funnier too.

You know, yeah, what would Jason do?

He'd gill?

He just slaughter everybody with No.

I love that T shirt, I guess is what I'm trying to say.

Do you have it?

No, I've looked before and I can't find the exact one.

There's a guy who we worked with who wore one to work once, and I was shirt's awesome but also unsettling in the office setting.

I can't remember his name.

He was a big guy and he looked like the kind he would wear that shirt.

He looked like he was clearly into horror movies.

Okay, he was strapping large dude.

I cannot remember his name.

He's a good guy, Okay, was this way back in the day was his buckhead?

Yeah yeah, oh yeah, way back in the day.

Yeah, that was back in the times where there were so many people working in her office that didn't know half of them were.

You would have interacted with this guy.

He was one of the writers.

Oh not, I remember that guy?

Yeah, that guy.

Yeah, the big dude.

Yes, like just very tall, big guy.

Yes.

Yeah.

Do you look like a football player?

Yeah, kind of.

Do you remember that shirt?

No?

But man, what a vague memory of that guy.

I'd totally remember.

Jerry would know.

But she's not here, No, she's not here as usual.

So back to James Harrison, what would he do?

Sadly he would eventually pass, but he lived to be eighty eight and like you mentioned, he just died recently in February of this year, but before we passed in nineteen ninety nine, which means his wife Barbara got to see this.

He was also a blood donor, by the way, quite regular.

Sure.

He received the Medal of Order in Australia for his efforts.

That's amazing.

Again, almost two and a half million babies just saved by this guy.

And he's not the only one.

He's one of just a small number of people that turns out who are able to donate blood because they produce the antibody needed to create the antid inoculation.

When this first was realized, I guess shortly after nineteen fifty eight, a group of women in Winnipeg in Canada got together and they became known as the rh Ladies of Winnipeg, and they started donating plasma to make the Canadian version of antid wind row.

And one of them was a woman named Mary tell you who had lost three different babies to RH incompatibility, and she went on to donate for fifteen years.

And again, this is not normal blood.

These people's blood is incredibly special and it saves babies.

Yeah, there's less than two hundred anti D donors in Australia.

One of those is a woman named Kieran Froes.

I don't know how you pronounce that froze freeze Freese.

Maybe is either the osylum or the asyluent.

But Kieran is a midwife and benefited from the anti D drug during her own pregnancies, and she learned that people who had the right kind of blood could donate for this, and she advocated to be allowed to do so.

And apparently had to like kind of lobby to be able to do it, right.

Yeah, because she didn't naturally make the antibodies herself like other people like James Harrison does.

There's a way that you can actually sensitize people by exposing them to the antibodies and then over time their body will start making the antibodies themselves, these protective ones.

And that's what she did.

She's like, I want to volunteer to be inoculated with this stuff so that I can start producing this plasma.

And she had to prove that she was no longer able to have children.

She had to send her medical records showing her hysterectomy to Lifeblood, the Australian Blood Donation people before they would even let her like get into this program.

Yeah, and we can't forget about the people who also allow that to happen by contributing to that program despite not having that urge negative blood, right, Like, she gets those sensitization boosters from people donating their blood to be transfused into her and others like her.

Yeah, And from what I saw, there was only one there's one matched donor that donates when they go in to give blood and they're anonymous.

When they go in to give blood, their blood is taken and given specifically to Karen Froze or Freeze.

So like this person is it's just cool that they're anonymous too, and that that's what they're doing.

Like that's some pretty niche blood donation.

If you think about it, you know.

Oh yeah, absolutely, and you know that they're they're doing the right thing.

In Australia.

Wealthier countries obviously have a better time with this, but very sadly, as you guessed it, studies estimate that half the women in the world who need treatment don't get it.

In developing countries obviously, most acutely fifty thousand fetuses and one hundred and fourteen thousand newborn sty every year as a result of this rh and compatibility who can't get this treatment.

And the United States we don't do a great job donating blood.

So I'm calling people out and asking you to step up to the table into that needle.

Sixty two percent of the population is eligible to donate, but three percent do so, compared to fifty seven percent in Australia that are eligible and fourteen percent do so.

So they could kick it up a bit too, but that three percent is shameful.

Yeah, it's not totally out of bounds though.

With other industrialized Western countries the UK two point six percent of the population, donates, four percent in France, and then somewhere between five and six for Denmark, Germany, Greece and Cyprus.

So yeah, we could definitely do a lot better.

It seems like from what I can tell, I look to find what country has the most blood donors.

From what I can tell, Australia far and away leads the pack from the whole world.

That's my own research, take it or leave it.

I didn't do any maths, so it is possible it's accurate, But that seems to be the highest percentage I could find was Australia's.

I bet you anything.

Old James Harrison has something to do with that in the news and story surrounding his.

Efforts, for sure, I would think so too.

This has spurred me to get out there and do this on the RAG too, So I'm going to donate some blood next week.

Good for you, buddy.

I'm going to get back to it too.

You may introduce me to it, and I've definitely fallen off so let's go together.

We can hold hands while we donate.

Oh, it'd be pretty cute.

That would be cute.

And you know what I'm going to get us matching with James Harrison's picture on it.

Very nice.

Okay, well, Chuck said very nice, which is what I was fishing for, which means also he just triggered listener mail.

Uh yeah, this is I guess, a bit of a correction for the heavy metal episode.

Hey guys, there are a few mistakes that I won't hassle you about.

After all, I didn't catch anything too significant.

However, I should tell you that Rob Halford's leather infatuation did not come from his time in S and M clubs and bars.

In his own book, Biblical Heavy Metal Scriptures is a chapter called Denman Leather, where he speaks about how, although it did spawn a leather fetish, his love for Denemon leather came from bands other bands like Saxon, who bore the combination and turned it into a heavy metal uniform of sorts.

He's even quoting him others reckon that I started wearing my studs and leather as a means to express my repress homosexuality.

No, I effing didn't Deneman.

Leather has been part of metal basically from the beginning.

It was a visual display of how the originators felt on the inside, the way the music sounded, the way they felt rebellious.

His book is great, by the way, I recommend it if you're into ancient metal gods.

Speaking on the topic again, thank you so much for the three part episode.

Guys, that has to be a record, right, including the horns episode.

I call that a triple much love to you all.

That is from Joshua Ernsberger of Ogden, Utah.

Very nice.

Thanks Joshua, thanks for setting us straight.

We appreciate that, especially from another josh You know what I'm saying.

That's right, and you know what, in your defense, that sounds like the kind of thing that is just everywhere on the internet.

I saw it everywhere, and I had no reason to doubt it, sure because I hadn't read Rob Halford's autobiography, which was just stupid of me.

Yeah, you didn't have time.

Sorry, I fell for it.

Everybody.

If you want to get in touch with this like Joshua did and set us straight, you too can send us an email.

Send it off to Stuff Podcast at iHeartRadio dot com.

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