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Edwin Cohn and the Harvard Blood Factory
How a chemistry “purist” built one of World War II’s greatest applied R&D laboratories.
The Minot and Murphy medical studies, coupled with large-scale manufacturing of liver extracts by firms like Eli Lilly, proved so effective that within a few years, so few people in the Boston area had pernicious anemia that it became hard for researchers to find enough patients in which to conduct clinical experiments. Nonetheless, one visitor to the Harvard lab, A.C. Chibnall, noted in a letter to the Rockefeller Foundation's Warren Weaver — largely responsible for funding the field of molecular biology into existence — that he had never seen a group of researchers that size "in which all the people seem so happy and get on so well together." A visitor to the pilot plant in the late evening might encounter a senior pharmaceutical firm manager clad in arctic clothing emerging from the cold room pushing an empty glass-lined Pfaudler tank out the door to be washed.
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