Blood Relatives: Friends and Aliens

Zimmerman’s 1973 Rh turns out to be an exciting read.  In the first 50 pages he introduces a whole host of mad scientists and a perplexing medical mystery.  I want to outline a few of these characters, but first this, from the other side of science (i.e., teh interwebz):

People with Rh-negative blood group have certain characteristics that seem to be common among the majority. Here is a brief list of the most common.

¨ Extra vertebra.
¨ Higher than average IQ
¨ More sensitive vision and other senses.
¨ Lower body temperature
¨ Higher blood pressure
¨ Increased occurrence of psychic/intuitive abilities
¨ Predominantly blue, green, or Hazel eyes
¨ Red or reddish hair
¨ Has increased sensitivity to heat and sunlight
¨ Cannot be cloned
¨ Alien Abduction and other unexplained phenomenon

(from the thread’s original poster at http://www.unexplained-mysteries.com/forum/index.php?showtopic=179790; emphasis added. I recommend reading the entire thread if you have the leisure to do so.)

I don’t know where these criteria come from, but I suspect it is not from the medical literature.  One of the most perplexing items on the list for me is “Cannot be cloned.” Some of the other stuff is almost understandable, at least as cultural tropes like alien abduction or racially inflected stereotypes like ‘psychic’ Celts (versus, e.g., ‘superstitious’ African Americans – same idea, different value tones).  “Cannot be cloned” is not just out of left field; it’s several blocks down the street from the ball park.

After some more poking around on teh interwebz, I found a more reality-oriented Rh negative registry page that mentioned cloning.  In discussing reasons why an Rh negative person might want to participate in a registry of people with similar blood types, it was pointed out that Rh negative blood couldn’t be produced by artificial means like cloning.  That page is currently down (looks like someone didn’t pay their hosting bill?); I don’t know where they got their information, but this is definitely a clue to where the “Cannot be cloned” criteria comes from.

Coming at it from the other end of time, as of page 52 in Zimmerman, I’m just up to about the 1950s where medical researchers have discovered they can safely produce supplies of the life-saving anti-Rh negative serum by injecting Rh positive blood cells into Rh negative men.

If “Cannot be cloned” is WAY on the other side of science, Nick Redfern’s subchapter “When a Mother Attempts to Kill Her Baby” (Bloodline of the Gods, p. 19) turns out, unexpectedly, to dance almost up to the dividing line.  Redfern’s discussion is, with all due respect, hysterically-toned bullshit.  However, reading through Zimmerman’s history of the discovery of the Rh factor, it appears that there may be one heart-wrenching story of a mother “poisoning” her child via breast milk that contributed to the discovery of the Rh factor.

The mother in question was one of the cast of mad scientists I mentioned above, a certain Dr. Ruth Darrow.  Dr. Darrow was a woman born in 1895 who became an MD in 1930.  She lost a baby boy to what thanks to her work later came to be understood as Rh hemolytic disease.  To make the loss worse, her son had survived birth and initial transfusions (then a new medical technique) and seemed to be doing well.  Dr. Darrow had the choice to start feeding him with some of the new-fangled prepared baby formula or use her own breast milk; she was conservative and chose the latter.  Her son died a few days later.  Zimmerman’s interviews with Dr. Darrow's surviving children indicated that the doctor felt like she was responsible for her son’s death, as if she had maybe poisoned him with her own milk.

Dr. Darrow became a monomaniacal scientist with a determined research agenda. For one thing, she still wanted another kid, but wasn’t about to give birth until she had solved the medical problem she faced – and her clock was ticking.   In the end, she all but perfected an understanding of the disease process behind what was then considered to be four separate syndromes occurring at different points of time for newborns: erythroblastosis, hydrops, icterus and congenital anemia.  But, as Zimmerman points out, this was about as right as Dr. Darrow would ever get.  She had the theory down, but in her further research chose to focus on the wrong blood biology mechanism.  The full understanding of the Rh factor and its clinical importance would emerge across many labs, scientists and publications.  And yet today it’s something we take for granted and ascribe to aliens.

But then, a woman MD in 1930 was pretty fucking alien - unlike still births, which happened so often they were obviously natural!  Another alien was Dr. Landsteiner, the apostate Jew who emigrated to the US from Europe and in his research sought out a new, more pure and scientific basis for social identity based on biology and blood type and along the way happened to get a Nobel Prize for discovering ABO blood types, lay the groundwork for saving millions of lives and yet still apparently manage to remain a tortured, vain, maladjusted misanthropic asshole his whole life.

I'll leave you with this:

"Landsteiner had dropped his blood research in 1901, after publishing his ABO discoveries.  But in the United States, twenty years later, he returned to the red cell - with a new an unusual purpose.  He was, perhaps, prompted by a refugee's sense fo alienation and deracination.   (Footnote: He had already repudiated his Jewish identity, by converting to Catholicism.  Later Landsteiner sued the editor of a Jewish Who's Who who planned to list him in it, saying, according to news accounts of his legal deposition, that he would "be greatly distressed and humiliated and exposed to ridicule and contempt" if identified as a Jew.  To be so designated, he added, would be "highly detrimental to my American mode of living and my family.")  He conceived the idea that a new system of human identity could be forged in the laboratory - where he was Master - on the basis of individual differences in the antigens that occur on red blood cells."

Aliens.  Aliens?  Aliens!