Radiolab - Blood

Episode Date: July 31, 2013

From medicine to the movies, the horrifying to the holy, and history to the present day -- we're kinda obsessed with blood. This hour, we consider the power and magic of the red liquid that runs through our veins.

Wait, you're listening. Okay. All right. You're listening to Radio Lab. Radio Lab. From W. N. Y. C. C.

C? Yeah. And NPR. So this is a blood that's made in Europe that I really enjoy. This is Christian Tinsley. He's a bloodsmith. It's like a fine wine. It is like a fine wine. I found this blood, and I used it on the film Passion of the Christ.

and I loved the color of it and the consistency of it. What's it called, by the way? Well, this one is called Bloody Real Blood. Bloody Real Blood. That is not the most imaginative title. They don't get creative. Bloody Real Blood. We have another one together.

Christian pulled out a few more. For example, you got a couple bottles right here. By the way, we visited him in his special effects warehouse. Right here in Hollywood. Yeah, what are these right here? This one right here is called Dried Blood Dark. Pretty self-explanatory. And then we have one that's called drying blood fresh.

And this is made by a completely different company. They all sort of have their advantages. Some are really good at color and flow consistency. There's different viscosity in the blood. We went through all of it with Christian House. Sometimes you want to make the blood a little thicker. So it flows out of the skin a little bit slower. Sometimes you need to splash around or sometimes you need more opaque blood, black blood, clear blood, green blood, vibrant blood, dark blood.

Do they have catalogs? There are catalogs for blood. And how, you know, if you can't find what you need in a catalog, you can take someone else's blood and tweak it. We might throw a material called metacillin to it. It's a thickening agent, very similar to what they use in jelly donuts. And at a certain point, as we were talking through all this stuff, it just felt like we weren't even talking about blood anymore.

Everything is synthetic. There's just a bunch of chemicals that had nothing to do with the inside of a human body. Yeah. But then, a funny thing happened. Now, when would you use, say, the condom full of blood here? Christian had walked us over to a table where he'd laid out a bunch of his tools. What would that come into? What you're seeing here is you're kind of seeing a table full of tricks.

We have the bladder on the knife. And he showed us this trick knife, super dull, but on the back of it, it had this little tube. And the tube runs along the back end and around the edge of the knife. Hidden from view. And how the trick works is you make like you're slashing someone, and right at that moment, you squeeze this little syringe full of fake blood that then goes through the tube and onto the blade of the knife. And I must say, it's the chintiest trick of it. seen. But it's a classic approach. You know, somebody gets cut on film.

I thought, let's just try it. Can I slice Robert across the face? You certainly can. So it will do. So he fills the syringe with bloody real blood. I get in position, holding the knife. It's not because I hate you right now. It's because we're doing a ritual. We're going to be blood brothers. Okay, ready? Here we go. One, two, three. We got the camera. Wait, wait. And this is the fakesest trick I have ever seen. I think I've said that already, but it's worth repeating. It's so fake. And yet. There we go. Give it a good. steady squeeze.

When the bloody real blood comes out. I mean, that's basically. That was thrilling and terrifying. I feel... And I was like, why am I getting woozy? Oh my God, my hand is shaking. I feel lightheaded when I see it. Ellen, too.

Like, I guess you can't be very... Okay, now I really am feeling lightheaded. I actually had to sit down. Oh, wow. Oh, my God. It really looks real. And it was like whatever, but it just didn't make any sense. If we want a continuous flow of blood, what we might do is we might just do a slow release,

and the blood is continuously flowing. Today on Radio Lab. Continuously flowing information about blood. Real bloody real blood. Royal blood. Bad blood. Young blood. And blood money.

You know, it's business. I'm Chad I boomrod. I'm Robert Crulwich. This is Radio Lab. Let's get bloody. Blood in the streets in the town of New Haven. Blood stains the roots and the palm trees of Venice. Blood...

I never thought I would become a terrorist. But that's what I became. That's what they called me. So we're going to start with a story about that guy you just heard. His name was Barton Benish. He was an artist working in New York in the West village in Manhattan in the 70s, 80s, and early 90s. He's pretty successful.

And famously social. Oh, my God. Not by any means your normal terrorist. I mean, he was just the most charming, welcoming, open, beguiling person you could possibly imagine. Although, given the story we're about to tell, he was also a bit of a prankster. I deal with fear. People's fears.

And he was nuts, which was a lot of fun. And by the way, that is Barton's best friend Joe. Joe Lovett, director and producer. We were very, very close friends. We talked almost every day. Joe says they actually began most days by calling each other up and hurling insults. Until we were laughing hysterically. You going?

Yeah. Really? Really? Am I that lucky? The basis of Barton's art was stuff. He would find stuff and then describe it or mount it. Actually, he had an enormous collection of stuff in his apartment. Hey, welcome to the catacombs.

My 10-room mansion. This is the cabinet of curiosities. It was a magnificent place. I did a film on it, actually. When you walk into it, my African collections. It was filled with drawers of spiders. The bull from Pamplona. Voodoo totems.

I even have an outhouse here. Desiccated animals, beaded pieces of bears and wolves and birds. In one drawer, he had human ashes and another. And fat from a liposuction? Yeah. Old poop. 25 million-year-old feces fossilized. I mean, anything.

he could find that was weird. That's Laurel Reuter, one of Barton's friends. That was taboo. For example, in another cabinet, he had Adolf Hitler's teaspoon. A severed human toe? Someone had been walking across, he was either Brooklyn or the Williamsburg Bridge. And he called me up and he said, I found a toe.

And they thought, well, Barton would be the person to give it to him. He mama fired it and kept it. People do bring you things. Oh, people sent him Madonna's underpants. What? Yes. People sent him Nancy Reagan's live. lipstick on a napkin from Texas, I think.

Somebody sent him Sylvester Stallone's urine. Ooh. How do they collect that? They cared so much about Barton that when Stallone peed in this urinal in a restaurant and didn't flush, they went and got. And although his apartment was filled with every different taboo button-pushing weirdness that you can imagine. The one area he didn't touch, at least not. at first was the thing that haunted his life the most. I never knew what to do about AIDS.

It was a hard subject for me. I was positive, and my boyfriend had died, and it was something I couldn't deal with. I couldn't make art about it. But then, one day... One day, he was in his kitchen cooking. He was a good cook, and he always cooked when we came to visit. I was in the kitchen cutting parsley,

and I cut a piece of my finger. He cut himself. And blood went all over the kitchen. And he went into this huge panic. I was so freaked out. The story goes Barton immediately thought, Oh my God, I'm going to get AIDS. But then in the next blink, he thought, well, wait a second.

Oh, I already have it. It's my own blood. It can't hurt me. Wait, what? He sort of forgot that he had it himself. But wait, I don't understand that, though. So he had AIDS. Oh, yeah. He knew he had AIDS.

Oh, yeah. Still, the sight of his own HIV-infected blood. His own blood was so viscerally terrifying to him that he ran out of the room. I went and got rubber gloves and bleach. And I thought, this is nuts. This is my blood, my kitchen, and I'm going through all this craziness. And that's when I thought, if I have this fear, you can imagine what other, the fear that other people have. You know, this is the very, very beginning of the epidemic.

In the early days, we were just talking about this last night, as a matter of fact. We had a friend who was hospitalized at New York Hospital. You know, they left his tray at the door. The medical people wouldn't go in. They were scared to go in? Terrified. Everybody was terrified. I remember they used to have these things on the door.

Beware. AIDS contaminated. Because of the blood. Yeah. It's hard to overstate just how frightening blood was in this moment. Nobody knew what anything was going on. There were conspiracy theories. There were thoughts that people were being poisoned.

All anyone knew is that people were dying, and it was because of something in the blood. You'd hear about it happening to someone, and then you'd hear about it happening to a friend of a friend, and then it would happen to a friend, and then it was your best friend, and then it was your other best friend, and your other best friend, and your other best friend. Unbelievable. We must have lost easily half of our gay friends. Easily half. So Barton...

I never know what to do about AIDS, and it was... something I couldn't deal with. When he cuts his hand open in the kitchen, sees the blood, freaks out and thinks, wow, there is a strange power to this blood, just the sight of it. Well, he has an idea. And I start making these weapons. The idea sounded simple. A series of works called lethal weapons.

Except they weren't very lethal looking. Like he took a little toy gun. A child squirt gun. One of those candy yellow toy guns. And he put his own blood inside of the squirt gun. He had passed a little toy gun. He had pacifiers with blood, baby pacifiers with blood, you know, nursing bottles with blood. One of those clown lapel flowers that squirted water?

Well, his squirted blood. Atomizers, perfume atomizers with blood. You can go. Yeah, they hate blood? Exactly. Now, you couldn't really squirt yourself with his HIV-infected blood because the work was put in these glass boxes. But the invitation was clear. Squeeze me.

I deal with fear. People's fears. And this one is what he called a poison dart. Joe has one of the lethal weapons in his living room. What is? It's a hypodermic needle. Very thin and long. That had been filled up with his blood. And then he put these delicate little feathers from an African bird.

On the back of the needle to make it look like one of those poison darts from a... An old James Bond movie? So Barton initially shows the work to Laurel, who mounts an exhibition at her gallery in North Dakota... And then? Then the show, it went to Sweden. And that's where things got interesting. It was extraordinary. That's Inger Tornburg.

She ran the gallery in Lund and Sweden where the lethal weapons landed. And she says within a day or two of the show opening. The authorities were here telling me to close the doors. That by law. They had to. For the safety of people coming into the gallery, we felt ashamed. We thought, this is Lund. We're a university town. We should know better. Well, wait a second. Did you know for a certainty that their fears were ridiculous?

No. I mean, HIV, the virus doesn't go away that quickly. In the beginning, we were scared. But we can't avoid fear in the world. So she told the authorities. Take it easy. Don't do anything. No one's going to get hurt. The blood is behind glass. But the other thing that happened is after the ban, flyers came out saying that we were selling HIV contaminated blood by the liter. Whose flyers were these?

Morning and evening newspapers. We didn't know where the information came from. Must have come from the health authority. But suddenly she says the whole town of Lund exploded. She had people coming into the gallery yelling. This is not art. How dare you? And you sell it for money.

What is this? We were overwhelmed. So they struck a deal with the health authorities. A compromise. They said, all right, here's what we'll do. We'll take the work, any of the work that sells, and we'll stick it in. An oven. Heat all them up. At 160 degrees Fahrenheit for two hours.

And thus kill everything possible. Can I just say that that's awesome? Which is the paper would curl or the glass? Well, the plastic would melt in the. the other. And then each work had a certificate saying it was safe to sell. I never thought I would become a terrorist.

But that's what I became. They called the AIDS horror show. All right, so the interesting thing, I don't know if you felt this way, is that like over the last few decades, AIDS has become a little bit less horrible. Mm-hmm. Just a little.

Yeah. So you'd think like those lethal weapons pieces, like that poisoned art that we saw in Joe's living room. Did it would lose its punch a little bit? after all these years. Yeah, because that's what happens to a lot of political art after you take it out of its moment, it just kind of fizzles.

Right. But weirdly, that doesn't happen with that piece. It still think it's an extremely powerful piece, and I think all those blood pieces are. They're really shocking. What's the power now? Well, I think blood is powerful. And so when you look at Barton's blood pieces,

whether they're AIDS blood or not, they're still blood. It's tinkering with a life force. I mean, he's right. Like, you see that blood. It's a man's viscera. It's not just art. And that guy's gone, so it's kind of ghostly in a way. We had a wonderful goodbye.

That's Laurel again. He said, I'm dying, and I wish my friends would stop trying to manage it. They tell me I have to, can't drink, and I can't do this, and I can't do that. And someone sent him a scale because he'd gained too much weight, and he was, furious. And so I said, well, let's have a bottle of wine. And we drank a bottle that night, and we talked about everything, saying goodbye, but mostly laughing. Laurel says that even at the end, when he was in really bad shape. He was still like a little child. His point of view of the world was full of glee and delight. And that's kind of maybe the thing that sneaks up on you in the end,

is that as you're looking at the blood, it's scary, and then suddenly, It's hilarious. You're like, oh, no, no, he's making a joke. But then it's also scary. It's a scary joke. But it's funny and scary. As if the thing that scares you most is also so absurdly frightening that you laugh at the same time. Yeah.

As Inger, Torenberg put it, Barton kind of made himself. Sort of skinless in some way. Yeah. It's a very generous offer to anybody who is receptive enough to take it. So the man himself melts away. And all we've got left is a patch of his blood that says, boo, and come laugh with me. Before we go to break, big thanks to Kelsey Padgett for production help on that piece.

Take one tear from a broken wound drop of fire of blood. This is Chad Kanekeke calling you from my living room in Cincinnati, Ohio. Radio Lab is supported in part by the National Science Foundation and by the Alfred P. Sloan Foundation, enhancing public understanding of science and technology in the modern world. More information about Sloan at www.sloan.org. Thanks. Hey, I'm Chad Abumrod.

I'm Robert Crowwood. This is Radio Lab today. Blood. Blood. Bitternness, exploding fire, wailing blood and bleeding. One time I was in the doctor's office and they were taking blood and they gave me all of the vials to hold, thinking, of course, that I would be fine with it. It was pre-drawing blood or post? This was as they were drawing blood.

Oh, you were holding vials of your own blood as it was coming out of you? Yes. They kept handing me the vials without capping them. And I fainted. So my hand flew up and all that blood and all that came poured over my face and my shirt and my clothes. And when I came to, everyone was screaming, including half of the waiting room. You were covered in your own blood? Covered in blood.

Like your whole shirt was soaked in blood. Oh, yeah. That's disgusting. That's disgusting. Well, it was only disgusting because you're just, we're all unfamiliar with blood. But back in the 1600s, just part of life. For Shakespeare, blood was blood. This is James Shapiro, Shakespeare expert, friend of our show, and he says,

people back in Shakespeare's day were familiar with the sight of blood, the feel of blood, even... You know, the smell of blood. What do I mean? Young Shakespeare, he's a kid. He grew up in Stratford, and at 21 he went to London. He came as an actor, and probably is the youngest actor in the company. What he was sent to do is to go to the shambles. That's a slaughterhouse. Block an F away and get a bucket of blood so that when they do the Spanish tragedy or any other,

I mean, they're not using fake blood. They're using animal blood in all these plays. They didn't use fake blood? No fake blood. Why fake blood? How do you get fake blood? You got to make fake blood. You just walk two blocks on the way from where he lived to the theater.

He's going to pass some kind of slaughtering area. I don't know how much it costs for a bucket of blood, but you need a bucket of blood for Titus Andronicus. You need a bucket of blood for Julius Caesar. In that play, Shakespeare has Mark Anthony say, I stand upon slippery ground. I mean, that stage is covered in blood, and he's slipping in this blood. And all the men had just stooped and washed in Caesar's blood up to, you know, the elbow. So there is blood in this play. In all of the plays, the comedies, the romances, the histories, all of them. I have some numbers for you that shocked me. Numbers.

Numbers. Numbers of what? Numbers of references to blood. Really? So, the word blood itself occurs 673 times in 571 speeches and 41 of Shakespeare's plays in poems, which means almost every playing poem. Now, should I be impressed because the word house appeared 9,600 in Fort? No.

This is a big word. This is a word that recurs, you know, 37 times in King John. March to the marketplace in Frenchman's blood. blood. Lusty blood again, which we give you. Living blood doth in these temples beat. 28 times in Richard the third.

One raised in blood and one in blood is In that congealed mouths and bleed of that royal blood. 22 times in Henry the fourth part one. With her own children's blood. Now it means a lot of different things. It means I'm of good blood. I'm of high social station. And of course there was bad blood or cursed blood or being hot blooded or cold blooded.

And sometimes, as in Macbeth, it just means blood. Blood will have blood. I am in blood. Steped in. I'm in. Of your blood is stopped. The head is saucers. The hands and faces wall batched with bloods his silver skin laced with his golden blood.

He's waiting. He feels he is waiting in blood. Just think of that for a moment. How horrible the experience must be. Think of stepping into the ocean. And it's blood. Thick. Smelly.

horrible to the touch. That is what Macbeth feels when he feels guilty. For most of us, this is just a metaphor. What I'm trying to say is for this culture, blood was more than a metaphor. So I have here one of his first

poems, the rape of Lucrease. Lucrease is the good wife of a very honorable man. She's raped by this son of a tyrant. He comes from the rule. family, the Tarquin, so he thinks he can get away with this. But Lucrez takes a knife at the end of this poem and stabs herself. So this is what happens.

The murderous knife, as it left the place, her blood in poor revenge held it in chase, which means the blood followed the knife out as she stabbed herself. And bubbling from her breast, it doth divide in two slow rivers that the crimson blood circles her body in on every side. It's a lot of blood. Some of the blood still pure and red remained. And some looked black. And that false tarquin stained.

So we're beginning to see that two kinds of blood are flowing out of... And that false tarquin stain? Yeah, because by... That's the raping... Tarquin is the guy who raped her, and from that rape, her blood got polluted. She now has two pools of blood. His dark and dangerous, hers red and pure.

And you can see this. This is a culture that understood, putrified blood looked a little off, looked little black, and this is... And this was meant to be thought of as literal, so that if you were raped, that's what your blood would change color, in part, in the bad part.

How do you prove intent in rape? How, you know, Tarkman's saying she wanted it? How would you know? Would this be almost like forensic? Would this be evidence? Absolutely. This is evidence that, proves that it was rape rather than anything consensual, you would know because she was raped

and the blood showed this to be tainted for this culture. Blood was the thing that makes you you. Life, death, kinship ties, and what is within you, what circulates within you. Your character. So blood was like essence. Yeah. All right, well, if Shakespeare saw blood as like your essential nature, well, this The next story is about what happens when that idea collided with science. How are we doing? And to sort through the debris of this collision, we talked with science journalist. Okay.

I'm Edward Dalmock, the author of The Clockwork Universe. A great read that opens right where our story begins. So it's 1660. England. It's Shakespeare's century. Isaac Newton is a brilliant young man, but nobody knows him yet. One of the big deals of this era is that science is just starting up. People are just beginning to tinker and fiddle with nature.

And in London, much of this tinkering went on in a rundown mansion. Every third Wednesday, some schedule like that, you would see this strange collection of men. Known as the Royal Society. Coming into the Royal Society quarters. Were they like the National Science Foundation of their day or just like a club? Well, it starts out as a club, but what makes it a terrific club is that at the beginning, there are essentially no rules. So you have Christopher Wren and Robert Boyle, which is to say Richard Feynman and Stephen Hawking. But next to them, you have some amateur violinist who's got a theory that if you tune the violin, some goofy way it would sound much better.

And next to him is a man with a potato in the shape of a unicorn. They're all bringing these wonders under their own. This kind of thing. People were thrilled at this time with experiments in general, and it didn't have to be a lot. Lighting fire crackers and throwing ice in the fireplace to see if it cracks or makes a big noise or pump out the air from under a jar

and put a mouse in it to see what happens. Any kind of experiment that you can think of is going on because nobody knows how anything works. So almost every question you can think of was in some sense a question worth asking. And one question which endlessly fascinated these guys, lucky for us, was a simple one. What is blood? Because blood in this era is this astonishing substance.

Everybody knew it was vitally important. Everybody had always known that since the first person to stab somebody else. But nobody knew what made it important. Nobody knew what it did. And it also had this mysterious, spiritual quality to it. In the same way that we have this notion of the brain and the mind, and there are different things, and one is physical, and one is floating around in some more abstract way.

The blood was this physical red stuff that dripped on your desk, but it also carried some soulful essence that marks you as you and me as me. But how do you get at that? This is an experimental question. So here was the first experiment. Question number one, what would happen? If you took a madman. This mad fellow.

A guy who was prone to fits to carrying on. Who said that? You took this guy and you filled him up with the blood of a sheep. And a sheep is famously docile, of course. What would happen? Would that docile sheep blood get inside the madman? And tame him? Soothe his raging fits. So the Royal Society ran some ads.

Can we find somebody to do this? We'll pay you a guinea, which is a few bucks today. That is to say, worth having, but not a fortune. And they're delighted to find this fellow Coga, Arthur Coga, because he's like the Mad Hatter or something. Like what we would these days call schizophrenic? I mean, was he crazy in that way or just like eccentric? The vocabulary is so different. It's hard to know. But he was in his day or our day, one of those people you would edge away from who's a... He's the guy on the subway. Right. In any case, on the day of the experiment, they bring Koga into the Royal Society and into the big theater there. And it is a full room.

There are wooden bleachers, and everyone is crowded together on those bleachers. Jostling for position, the early comers get the best seats. In the front of the room is a little table, and the sheep is on that table. They sit Kogo right next to the sheep. The sheep is tied down, and they cut a slit. A tiny one right across an artery in the sheep's neck. And our man, Arthur Koga, they have him. Put his arm on the table and they cut open a vein of his.

Now they take a skinny little metal tube and they run it between the tooth. So that blood goes from the sheep's neck into the man's arm and back. And then they wait and wait and wait. Well, how long would you think you'd have to wait for a madman to become sheeplike in his personality change? Well, I guess they had waited for him to spring up from the... the table and uh but there is no buying there is no sudden coming to his senses but nobody drops dead and that counts as a success and they thought you know maybe we're just not getting at this the right way maybe there's some other experiment that if we did it properly we could find out the answer

to this question what is in the blood that makes each person special and in fact around that time the eminent scientist of the day this great figure guy by the name of robert boyle proposed 16 experiments that they ought to do. Now, there are no records of the experimental results, but we can pretty much imagine how it went. Number one, the blood of a cowardly dog. Put that into a fierce dog. Let's see if that makes the fierce dog more tame. So they try that, and that doesn't work.

Okay. Well, what if you took a dog that has a fabulous sense of smell like a bloodhound, and you put his blood into some ordinary dog who couldn't find his way home? Will that dog suddenly have a fabulous sense of smell? And no. No, that didn't work. Fine. Suppose you have a dog taught to fetch and carry or to dive after ducks,

and you put his blood into a common ignoramus dog who doesn't know anything. Will the simpleton dog suddenly be pointing out ducks to his master? And no. No, it turns out. Boyle tries variation after variation of this, and to cut to the chase, none of them with any useful result. And it was around this time, if you ask historian, that our general thinking about blood

began to shift. We stopped seeing blood as this magical thing. There's no essence in there. It's just biology, really. You know, platelets, proteins, red blood cells. That's how we see blood now. And those experiments in 1666? The experiments sound to us absolutely ludicrous.

And of course they are. Except they were on to something. She's transferring me so that another one of her colleagues can also... All right, Saul, can you hear me? Yeah, I can hear you. Sweet. So recently, our producer, Lynn Levy, found out about some research, some new research that might make you think differently about those experiments back in 1666.

Right. So I called up one of the researchers. So my name's Saul Valeda, and I'm a faculty fellow here at UCSF, so I just started my own lab. You have your own lab? Is it like, it's the Saul lab? It's the Valada lab, yeah. You're still pretty young, right? Yeah, I'm 32.

So Saul does experiments with mice. Okay. And there's one thing that you need to know about mice just to understand this whole thing. Which is what? Mice really hate water. You throw them in the water? They want to get out of there as fast as possible. See, there's a classic experiment that scientists have been doing for a while.

There are a lot of variations. The idea is that you take a big pool of water and you build a maze in it. Water maze? You know, it's like a mouse-sized maze. And then we actually put a platform in the pool. Somewhere under the water, you know, the mouse can't see it. Doesn't know it's there. If you're a mouse and you stumble across this platform, you're like, oh, I can totally use this.

To get out of the water. Which I don't like at all. So I'm very excited about this platform. Because you can rest. You could rest. So wait, why do they do this to the mice? The point is, like, you want to see how fast the mice can learn and remember where the platform is. So it's like a learning test.

It's a learning and memory test. And what you do is... You keep dropping them into the pool. over and over and you just see how long it takes them, you know, to learn where the platform is. Exactly. So what you notice if you do it a lot, this kind of experiment, is that there's a pattern that emerges and it has to do with age. A young animal gets it. They figure it out much faster. Once they've done it a couple of times.

Let's say after, you know, the sixth or seventh time that you drop them in there. They're like straight, stop, left, right? Got it. They go straight to it. But the old guys, they don't do that. So what does it look like if you drop an old mouse? According to Saul, no matter how many times you run an old mouse through the maze. No matter what you do to them, they're just not getting better.

So it's like, do I go left to you? Right? I'm pretty sure it was right last time. Why do they make it like this? It's really hard. But that's where the blood came in. So Saul had an idea that was kind of similar to boils, you know, 350 years ago. This is 760?

Although Saul didn't actually know about any of those old experiments. I gave him a copy of the paper. That's crazy. I'm going to keep this. Anyway, his new but old question was this. Well, what happens if you mix young and old blood? Does this affect learning and memory? So one of the things he did was he took blood from an old mouse who's, you know,

they're really bad at learning where the platform is, and he put it into a young mouse who's really good, just sort of to see what would happen. Wait, so he put old blood in young mice? Yes. And then we did all the tests. You know, drop them in the pool, the whole thing. them in the pool the whole thing.

And what happened? Well, all of a sudden. They did much worse. The young animal looked a lot more like an old guy. Suddenly, this young mouse was just like wandering around the maze all confused, you know, like an old mouse. Not quite as bad, but pretty close. No idea where he is. No idea where the platform is.

The old blood really did impair learning in memory. Wow. Isn't that crazy? Yeah. What's, is there something in the blood that would, change the mental state of the recipient? What was blood doing? It's a good question.

Saul and his collaborators also did another experiment to get at that very question. And in this one, there were young mice who got old blood, but there were also old mice who got young blood. They went both ways, yeah. And at the end of the experiment, instead of looking at behavior... We looked at the brain. See, they were looking at a part of the brain that specializes in learning and memory, and they were, were looking for a very specific thing. Brand new baby neurons.

See, when you're young, as you learn things, your brain makes lots and lots of baby neurons. But as you get older, not so much. Not so much. So Saul and his collaborators, they took all these mice, you know, old mice who got young blood, young mice who got old blood, slice their brains real thin. Thinner than a slice of paper. And when hunting for baby neurons. So I counted all of these in a microscope, right?

So literally with a little clicker, I just... So wait, you're clicking like every time you see a new... A new neuron, like, click, click, click, click. Apparently when you zoom in on one of these little neurons. They look like little trees, really, when you're looking at them. So little tree... Click. Little tree...

Click. Over hours and hours and hours. Until finally one night, pretty late. It was, I think, like, one or two in the morning. He gets his first look at the results. In a young animal, it was about a 25% decrease. in those baby neurons. Was it dramatically?

Oh, yeah. I mean, you could see it. Just by looking. So it seems like somehow when he gave the youngsters this old blood, the old blood was preventing baby neurons from forming. Huh. Now, in the old mice... Normally in an old animal, you're hard pressed to find, you know,

a handful of these cells. But after the old guys had been filled up with this young blood... All of a sudden... We were getting, you know, maybe two or three times as many new neurons as we had seen before. Two or three times as many. And they looked better. You know, they looked longer and they looked a lot more like the young neurons did. Chad?

I'm a little closer. Stay away from me. So does this mean what it sounds like it means? Like, you know, I get the young blood and suddenly I can finish today with my gloves, umbrella, and my keys all in my run. Right hand pockets? You mean instead of losing them on the one train? Yeah. Maybe, but we're not at all ready to say that yet.

Oh, yeah. This is really new stuff. There's a lot more work that needs to be done before we know, like, really even what it means. But it does seem possible, right? I feel like if you come out with a result that says, like, yes, you can find, like, you can do the water maze better if you're full of young blood, like... Crazy, right? Yeah, it's crazy. And it's, like, it, like, freaks me out a little bit.

Like, I feel like old women are going to be. buying vials of baby blood. You sound like my mother. My mother is this on a good day, five-foot Latin lady. She's from Guatemala, and she's loud and excited, and she sounds just like you just in Spanish. Oh. She's like, miho, be careful.

Be careful. Because? Well, she's worried that, you know, like, all of a sudden, like 16-year-olds are going to go missing. Don't you worry about that? Like, that seems to be, that does seem to be the logical extension of this, though. Oh, man. you really do sound like my mom.

But they are at least sure that it is the introduction of the new blood that is the agent of change. Yeah, pretty sure, because this isn't the only study. There have actually been a bunch of studies in the past several years that have come out with similar results for different parts of the body. Like the skeletal muscle can repair itself better when there's young blood in the mix. Actually, the heart, there was a really recent study at Harvard. Amy Wagers is one of the people who worked on it. I went to visit her at her lab in Cambridge. I'm from WNYC Radio in here.

And one of Amy's assistants, Donica, showed me this tiny little vial. Wow, this is really frozen. It's minus 80 degrees. It had a protein in it that they got out of the blood, a very special protein. Oh, boy. Called GDF 11. So you've just opened the freezer and it's like crusted in ice

and taking out a little red box. What do you got? So that's what it looks like, GDF 11 in a vial. So it's basically the purified protein that we keep at minus 80. So they think that the clear stuff in this vial, it does something kind of amazing. Because when you get older, your heart tends to get bigger, which is not, it's, you don't want that.

It doesn't work as well. You want it to stay small. So what these Harvard people did is they took these old enlarged mouse hearts and bathed them in young blood, and they shrunk back down to be like young heart size. And they think that very important protein is the mechanism. That's the key. It looks like absolutely nothing.

Exactly. It's pretty much it. So you can see the frozen liquid at the bottom. That's really it. So that's a very important little thing in that vial that looks like nothing. Exactly. It regenerates many systems. So that's the research being done in Boston, right?

It's beeping. because it's angry? Yes. Going up in temperature, so. But then you talk to the guys, to Saul and the guy he's working with. They're looking at 600 proteins right now, trying to figure out which one might be implicated or which ones might be implicated. And if you were to talk about all the proteins in your blood,

if you include all the splices and little variant proteins, there could be up to 100,000 of them. Wow. Yeah. So there's 100,000 different agents in there doing something? Yeah. Producer Lin Levy. Word of message.

Leon Tornberg in Sweden. Hi, this is Jim Shapiro. This is Doug Starr. Reading the credits for Radio Lab. Radio Lab is supported in part by the National Science Foundation and the Alpert D. Sloan Foundation. Enhancing public understanding of science and technology in the modern world. information about Sloan at www.sloan.org. Uh, I know you guys were thinking about the Dracula version. I don't think I can do it, but let me, I'll give it a shot.

Radio Lab is produced by WNYC and distributed by NPR. Three, two, one. Hey, I'm Chad Aboumrod. And I'm Robert Quilwich. This is Radio Lab, and today, Blood. I'm told we're going to get some pretty cool donors today. So here we go. All right, so there are places in the country where people give a lot of blood, like Minneapolis, Minnesota, or Columbus, Ohio. All right, that one goes in the paper bag here. Where, if you go to a blood drive, and we did. Hey.

Hi. In today's date and a phone number on there is all. You'll find a really comforting scene. People with busy lives taking a moment to walk into a cubicle room, sit down with some nurses. How is just iodine at all? No. Stick out their arms. All right, you ready for the fun part here?

Yes. And... And then I'll just mark your vein just to make sure I know exactly where I need to go. Stick it in and save some lives. How about that? I'm super excited. And... Now's the time to look away.

I do not like to watch. Beautiful. Okay, that kind of hurt. It did hurt? Yeah. Oh, I'm sorry. It's okay. And one by one, they drain their own blood, sometimes a double dose.

You give double the amount. Yeah, like this guy. Well, I do feel a little woozy. All to help strangers, they will never meet. And if you ask these phones... Why do you die? You'll get the answers you expect and that you hope for. You know, well, because...

Why wouldn't you? It's selfish not to. It's the right thing to do. Being healthy, I have a responsibility. I thought about a person in need in a hospital. My mom used to work in a neonatal ICU. She always tells stories about the babies that needed blood transfusions, and it always just made me think of, like,

if I had a kid, I would really want blood to be there for them to have blood. I mean, the simple point is that giving them. blood is a gift, right? It's the most selfless thing you can do. It's the most loving thing you can do. It's the gift of life. You can't give any greater gift than that. That's the message we've gotten in PSAs for the last half century.

But if you poke into it, as if with a big long needle. And if that long needle is named Molly Webster. And so on Wheeler. You'll find that the reality is way more complicated. Way more complicated. Okay, this is it. This is Gil Gull. We should just say, first of all, that this whole story started for us with this guy.

Gilgall, he's a longtime newspaper reporter. And now I'm retired and I write books. Gilbert Gull, retired newspaper man. I worked 40 years in newspapers. And the story that Gil ran into actually started back in the late 1980s. What happened was, well, Red Cross would come to our office. To do blood drives. And I literally was giving blood one day.

sitting in the chair with a needle in his arm. And the blood was draining out of my arm into the bag. And a very simple question popped into his head. I wonder what happens to this stuff after, you know, it gets into this bag. It's just, who knows why I was thinking this? I certainly don't remember. But I suggested to Craig Stock, my editor. Hey, you know, why don't we just do a little explainer about blood for a Sunday piece?

Just a short little thing about what happens to the blood, how it's processed, where it ends up. I said, sure, go ahead. And so I called up the local Red Cross, set up an interview with the executive director of the Blood Center there. And I went up to see this guy. And the strangest thing happened. Before I could even ask any questions, he started in at me wanting to know why I wanted to know this stuff. What was the purpose? Why was I coming after Red Cross?

but he was just extraordinarily defensive. And for me, as a reporter, I mean, my antennae are going up. And that's how it all started. At that point, what was supposed to be a nice little Sunday piece about the gift of life turned into a crazy story filled with... Hospital contracts. Money and salaries. Business and economics.

Pharmaceuticals. Verbal assaults. Commodity. Enterprise. I absolutely had moments when I would sit back and say, God, I can't believe this is going on. What? What's, what is you talking about?

You're going to tell you one second, maybe two minutes. But first, you should know that historically, there's always been like a tension in the way we think about Bud. Attention. Yeah. So I'm going to rewind. When Bud was first being used, it was during wartimes during World War I. That's Scott Carney. He's the author of the book, The Red Market.

And it hit big business in the Battle of Cambrai. That was the very first time medics realized they could use preserved blood, have it on the battlefield at the ready any time they wanted it. So you could keep your troops alive longer if you had blood available. Still, the blood didn't last very long, and the process of giving blood, that was pretty gruesome and painful. But by World War II and into the Korean War, we'd gotten much better storing and transporting blood,

and giving blood was less painful, which meant people back home could get involved. What happens is there are these massive ramp-ups. You can give these men the gift of life a pint of your blood. To get blood to the battlefield. The Department of Defense is calling for all Americans to roll up their sleeves. For the first time, you saw these amazing magazine advertisement, you know, showing a soldier on one knee holding his rifle and to say, he give his blood. Will you give yours? That's Douglas Starr, author of the book Blood.

An epic history of medicine and commerce. In Britain, there was this idea, you know, we're being bombed. And, you know, we want to do anything we can do to help the war effort. Now, in the United States, there was a voluntary donation system. But there's also this thing, hey, we're Americans, let's make some money on it as well. So what happened in the states is that you had these two systems. You had the voluntary sort of Red Cross model, and you also had these places that would pay you. Anywhere from 15 to 40 bucks.

For your blood. Really? Yeah. All over the country, usually in the Skid Row's. The Skid Row Shanty Towns. People are setting up these for-profit blood centers, and they're paying people for their blood. People called them booze for ooze because they were often set up next door to liquor stores. And sometimes instead of in money, they would pay in chits redeemable at liquor stores.

So you can imagine the population they attracted. According to one eyewitness account. There were worms on the floor. It was a dirty, dirty business. You know, like your first college apartment. It was just a really, really bad place. and... I don't think it would probably worse than my first college department.

I know, I was like, worms on the floor. I don't know where you were living, Scott, but... But worms weren't really the problem. I mean, on the one hand, these paid places... Got a lot of blood. The volumes were quite high. But pretty quickly, doctors on hospitals, they started to notice that... That paid blood is lower quality than altruistic given blood.

Because you're attracting people who are down and out... Might have disease. A lot of infections. A lot of hepatitis. And if they were sick, they'd still want to get paid, so they'd lie about it. Prisoners were giving blood. The state of Arkansas funded its whole prison system

on blood cells. And of course, everybody from the blood bankers to clergy people are saying this is obscene. There is something sacred about blood. It's not a commodity. It's a holy substance.

And so by the late 60s, the early 70s, people were saying, no more paid blood. We need to get rid of it. All blood should be donated. It should be given freely. And it was partly about making blood safe,

but it was really about more than that. In addition, to just being safer. An altruistic blood supply brings the society together. Because when you're giving blood out of altruism, you are saying ultimately, I'm doing this for the society in general. I'm doing it for the war effort.

I'm doing it because I'm an American. And that it has this other effect that brings a whole nation together. So today there's no more paid blood? No paid blood. So no money involved. Well, kind of. Which brings us back to Gil.

You know, I want to know a little bit more about how this works. And so what happens? After his conversation with the Red Cross guy, Gil went out, he got a list of all the blood banks in the country, and he just started going down the list. I would call one a day or call two a day and ask them, what do you charge for a unit of blood? What do you charge? Yeah, this was one of the surprises. It turns out right after they draw the blood. It feels kind of, the tube feels warm.

because it's coming right out of your body right after they'll put it in a bag keep it on ice package it up and they will sell that pint of blood to a local hospital yep so we do have different contracts with different hospitals

different blood centers I believe right now it's like almost $300 a pint is what they sell it for that's 300 bucks up a pint I was thinking five dollars yeah no

we should say 300 is actually kind of like a rough average for most major cities Right. And theoretically, the price that the hospitals pay the blood center is it's just to cover costs. And there are a lot. The salaries, the bags, the testing, the distribution business office, public relations. That's just a partialist that one former blood banker gave us. But that's really what Gil wanted to understand. You know, when someone donates a pint of blood, what does it cost to process that blood? And then what do you turn around and sell it for? And some of the places were shocked by the questions. Some of them would say there's no way on earth we're going to tell you. of them would say, oh, you know, we charge $48 a unit. So he made a list on a legal yellow pad.

Of all the different prices, the blood banks would charge their local hospitals. You might see at that time as low as the low 30s and as high as 70 bucks. And you wondered, you know, why the variation? Some of it was explainable. You know, labor costs are higher in Los Angeles, New York. So that made sense, but where that got interesting was... He says he just happened to be talking to some blood banker, probably a guy from the Midwest. Maybe about prices. And the guy just casually mentions that his blood bank actually gets way more blood than it needs. Yeah.

They had a surplus. And they told him... What we do is, you know, we take that blood. And we sell it to other blood banks. We sell it to somebody who can't collect enough. And I probably reacted like, what? And that led him to call up a blood bank. in a little town called Appleton, Wisconsin.

In Appleton, they... That blood bank at the time was pulling in plenty of blood, way more than they needed. Oh, yeah. Locally. I knew that Appleton had no trouble collecting plenty of blood. And yet, around the holidays... The director himself was quoted in the local paper saying,

like, oh gosh, we can't collect enough blood. You know, we're pleading with you to come in. We've never had it so tough. And Gil basically asked the guy, why are you saying this? You're doing fine. I did what any reporter would do. I began to press them on some numbers. He acknowledged that half of the blood they were collecting in Appleton was actually being sold to other blood centers. Appleton was taking a chunk of that blood, marking it up $10 a pint and selling it to...

I think it was Lexington, Kentucky. I called Lexington Kentucky. They were taking that blood, taking out the platelets, and then selling the red blood cells to Broward. Broward County, Florida. So I then called Broward. And he found out that Broward was marking it up $20 more a pint and selling it. To New York City, which is always looking for blood. They could never collect

nearly enough blood. Basically, what he discovered was that the whole gift economy of blood, that was only on the bottom level. I'm just feeling the direction at the vein right now. It's nice and plump. It was only down there. You have an absolutely gorgeous vein in here. Absolutely gorgeous.

I do. You do. Do. As soon as you moved up around? It was a market. Blood was being bought and sold and marked up at every step of the way. And this was, we're talking late 80s here. This is.

Yeah, late 80s, 88, 89. And is this still going on? Oh, yeah. And it's huge, huge business. I looked at the Red Cross tax return yesterday just to refresh my memory. When I was writing about them, their blood business was a $500 million a year business. It's now a $2.1 or $2.2 billion a year business. And it's not just the Red Cross.

I mean, the Red Cross does like half of the blood collections in the United States, but there are small independent blood banks all over the country. And we pulled some of their tax forms, and they have revenues of $30 million over there. There's $70 million over there. Some of them are $50 million. When I left the blood center, we were at the time about $90 million a year blood center.

So this, this is Charles Rewalt. I have been in blood banking actually since about 1973. And more than any other guy we talked to, he really gave us a feeling for the business side of the blood business, especially... In South Florida. In South Florida, in the 80s and 90s, you had kind of an unusual situation because you had a bunch of different blood banks. There was a program in Miami-Dade. There was one in West Palm Beach. All these different programs competing for the same donors.

You might anticipate there would be some competition, but you didn't think that you could ever see anything like South Florida. Things became quite heated. The heads of the blood banks attacked each other in the press. In the press, in the local stories, yeah. They got into crazy bidding wars over access to high school students. The Great School Board War, yes. They accused each other of stealing donors,

underpricing their products in order to gain market share. One morning I would go to work. That's Peter Thomasulo. He was one of Casey Rualt's competitors. And I would find that one of our hospitals had been visited by Casey and his team, and they had given us notice that they were going to switch to Casey. That feels horrible. Well, it's business. At a certain point, the competition says Casey got so intense.

That I got a number of ugly phone calls from people. Saying what? We're going to bury you. We're going to bury you. Mm-hmm. In that case, the call came from a New York blood bank. Casey had decided that the only way he could compete in Florida and the only way he could keep his blood from going bad

was to take his blood up to New York, sell it to New York hospitals at way below market value. So we were undercutting the blood supplier in New York at that time. And they didn't like that. No, but... It worked. We became known sort of as the Golden Arch to New York. He eventually figured out that he could buy blood on

cheap from a place like, say, I don't know, Iowa and sell it up the chain to New York. So you really did become kind of a... A blood runner. Well, we called it arbitrage. Arbitrage. Yeah, it's exactly arbitrage, isn't it? We were arbitraging the units. I mean, that's in Wall Street.

That's like the most cutthroat of the cutthroat are arbitragers. Yeah, but we're talking here about blood. And do you throw it away or do you find a home for it? Casey says if he hadn't done that, he would have had to pour that blood down the drain. If you're running a blood center, you have an obligation to make sure that the promise that you made to that donor is fulfilled, that your unit is going to go to take care of somebody who is sick. Throughout the blood banking industry, I have yet to bump into somebody who wasn't motivated by that promise. Even the guy on the other end of the phone call who said, I will bury you. I think you had the same motivations as you?

Yeah. Actually, it was a she. Oh, really? And here's the thing. Like, at a certain point, I mean, Molly, I think you'll agree. Like, we started to feel kind of differently about this whole blood business, blood system kind of stuff. Molly, do you agree about that? I do agree.

I mean, like, we've talked to. How many blood bank people have we talked to? Oh, God. Tons. Yeah. I have to say, like, these guys are not, you know, they're not that cut. throat's Wall Street person. Like talking to them, they're not like that. I mean, they're stuck with a reality that demands that they act in business-like ways. But not to be intentionally naive here.

Like, I know businesses have to run like businesses, but there's some part of me that just doesn't want blood to be a business. It shouldn't be a business. Well, I mean, maybe you need to let go of that idea. Yeah, I found, like, I kept reporting this and I kept saying, why did everyone keep telling me it was a gift? If it's kind of this commodity that everyone's shuttling around, why don't we just call it what it is. We keep hiding behind this idea of a gift. I would still donate. I don't think I care.

You know, maybe we need to let a little bit of that gift image go. I mean, there is something wonderful about giving. And I think one of the touching things to see was how after 9-11, so many people rushed to give blood. And after the Boston Marathon bombing, so many people rushed to give blood. Unfortunately, especially after 9-11, that was based on a number of. an old-fashioned idea that no longer is valid. And it may actually be harmful, according to Douglas Starr. Take 9-11.

What happened after 9-11 is all the politicians said give blood. The Red Cross kept saying giving blood, but the people in the know, the other blood bankers are saying, no, no, stop. Stop. We can't use it. You know, I spoke to the head of the blood bank of New York, ground zero. He said, as soon as I saw the plane hit the building, I thought, we're not going to be able to use that blood. Wow.

They had huge lines. all of the facilities got overwhelmed all over the country. A lot of the facilities ended up having to pour a lot of blood down the drain. Blood went bad, but there was this other rebound effect, and that is if you've stood online to give blood and came out and said, you know what, go home, we don't need you. Psychologically, you feel that you've done your thing. So six months later in the winter season, during Christmas,

when they usually have lows, they had historic lows because nobody would come out to give. Oh, because they were like, oh, we gave blood, they were full. Yeah, I did my civic responsibility. So the final stages, we really do have to understand that this is a pharmaceutical. That might be another way to think about blood. I mean, it's a drug. It's not simply a gift that I can choose to give or not give. It's a precious raw material.

And I'm the only one who have, well, we are the only ones who have it. And when it comes out, yeah, some people make some money on that. And yeah, they could definitely be more upfront about that. I wish they were a little more transparent. Definitely. But I'm the only one who has this stuff. And when I stopped to think about how powerful this drug, this pharmaceutical, really was, I kind of decided maybe I should give.

That is a really big one. So make a fist and hold. You're going to turn your head on the other side if you don't want to look. And you're going to feel a pinch, okay? Don't move your hand. Take a deep breath. Thank you for being my first nurse, donor nurse. Producer Sorin Wheeler, Molly Webster.

Special thanks to Rachel Quimby and Anna Weggle. And also Edward Scott and Jeff McCullough. And before we go, we actually had the Brooklyn band Lucius play a couple of blood songs that we use in this episode. You might have heard one earlier. Here it is. Well, you can get that blood song from Lucius plus one more on our website, RadioLab.org. It's a free download.

Thanks for listening. Hi, this is Scott Carney. This is Dan Tracy. And I'm calling to leave a message about you guys for you guys on the radio. So here you go. Radio Lab is produced by Jad Abamrod. Our staff includes Ellen Horn, Soren Weiler, Pat Walters, Tim Howard, Brenna Farrell, Molly Webster.

Melissa O'Donnell, Dylan Keith, and Levy, and Andy Mills, with help from Matt Couty, Kelsey Paget, Derek Clement, and Shruti, Phinemeni. Pinnamanei. Special thanks to Ania Burgess, Amy Wagers, Francesco LaFredo, Stefan Anderson, and Barbara Johansson.

And Joe, take through the heart. Love it. Ah, ah, ah, ah, ah. Goodbye, radio lab. Goodbye.