[HN Gopher] Edwin Cohn and the Harvard Blood Factory
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       Edwin Cohn and the Harvard Blood Factory
        
       Author : mailyk
       Score  : 39 points
       Date   : 2025-01-05 18:23 UTC (3 days ago)
        
 (HTM) web link (www.asimov.press)
 (TXT) w3m dump (www.asimov.press)
        
       | adamc wrote:
       | Knowing that you are in a war for your existence -- which is how
       | a lot of people viewed WWII -- does tend to refocus your
       | objectives.
       | 
       | I wish we would approach climate change this way.
        
         | drawkward wrote:
         | It will take a climate based, planetary-scale blitzkrieg to
         | shock people into focus.
         | 
         | And still there will be people on the home front who side with
         | the bad guys, just as in WWII.
        
         | inglor_cz wrote:
         | See also the immensely fast development of robotic warfare on
         | the Russo-Ukrainian front.
         | 
         | Maybe 15 years of peacetime development compressed into 3 years
         | of frenzy.
        
       | Modified3019 wrote:
       | Never heard of him before so the title was a bit "wtf". The
       | second paragraph is an excellent overview of why this is
       | interesting:
       | 
       | >In 1940, with the likelihood of America's involvement in World
       | War II steadily rising, the U.S. military approached Cohn about
       | developing medical products from blood proteins to treat shock
       | and blood loss in soldiers. Cohn's team quickly invented methods
       | to make blood albumin, which had a notable positive impact on
       | soldiers' survival from the earliest days of the American war
       | effort. During the Normandy beach landings, many wounded soldiers
       | were treated with Cohn's albumin products. And, by the end of
       | 1945, his Harvard team of scientists were so effective at turning
       | lab discoveries into commercial-scale products that millions of
       | Cohn's blood products were used in all theaters of the war
       | effort.
        
         | user982 wrote:
         | TIL that albumen and albumin are different things, with the
         | former containing the latter.
        
           | hilux wrote:
           | And both are seven-letter words! Very useful knowledge for
           | Scrabble(tm).
        
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