In 1999, James Harrison received the Order of Australia, one of the highest awards of this country, which he was a little ashamed to accept. Harrison, who has saved an incredible number of people, does not consider himself a hero. Rather, a debtor who finally managed to pay his debt. And along the way to become famous all over the world, but everything comes to an end.
Today James Harrison is 81 years old and the doctors simply insisted that he no longer donate blood, even if it is priceless. Age makes itself felt, and it is a sin to demand something else from a person who has passed 1,173 portions of plasma in his life, and unique in content. He is not just an honorary donor, according to the hero himself, it is his talent to donate blood. For which he received the unofficial nickname «Golden Hand», because most of the blood was extracted from there.
But much more this man is known as the one who saved 2.4 million. young lives — Australian babies. This country has long suffered from the so-called «rhesus disease», when in the body of a pregnant woman, the Rh factor of the blood could differ from the indicators of the fetus. And then the mother’s body involuntarily attacked her growing child, which led to monstrous rates of mortality and disability in newborns. We figured it out only in the late 60s, when Harrison became a donor on a permanent basis.
In the course of research, it turned out that there was a unique antibody in Harrison’s blood that disrupted the attack mechanism and allowed minimizing the risks of developing the disease. On its basis, after many years of work, an injectable Anti-D drug will be created, but even after its appearance, Harrison’s blood remained very popular among women in labor. Therefore, unofficially, he is the father-by-blood of a huge number of Australian children, for which the nation is grateful to him.
And the most interesting thing is that Harrison has nothing to do with it. At the age of 14, he underwent a severe lung operation, which required the infusion of a huge amount of donated blood into him, according to some sources, three times more than his own. As a result, a bizarre «cocktail» was formed, which gave rise to such a useful antibody. Therefore, Harrison himself always claimed that he was simply paying his debt — once donated blood saved him, and now he will return everything a hundredfold, selflessly and honestly. Which is what I’ve been doing all my life, but now it’s time to retire.
