[RADIOLAB INTRO]

CHRISTIEN TINSLEY: So this is a blood that's made in Europe that I really enjoy.

JAD ABUMRAD: This is Christien Tinsley. He's a bloodsmith.

CHRISTIEN TINSLEY: It's ...

ROBERT KRULWICH: Like a fine wine.

CHRISTIEN TINSLEY: 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.

JAD: What's it called, by the way? What's ...

CHRISTIEN TINSLEY: Well, this one is called Bloody Real Blood. Bloody Real Blood.

ROBERT: [laughs] That is not the most imaginative title.

CHRISTIEN TINSLEY: They don't get creative.

ROBERT: Bloody Real Blood.

CHRISTIEN TINSLEY: We have another one ...

JAD: Christien pulled out a few more.
CHRISTIEN TINSLEY: For example, you got a couple bottles right here.
ROBERT: By the way, we visited him in his special effects warehouse.
CHRISTIEN TINSLEY: Right here in Hollywood.
JAD: What are these right here?
CHRISTIEN TINSLEY: This one right here is called Dried Blood Dark.
JAD: Pretty self-explanatory.
CHRISTIEN TINSLEY: And then we have one that's called Drying Blood Fresh. And this is made by a completely different company. They all have their advantages. Some are really good at color and flow consistency. There's different viscosities in the blood. And ...
JAD: We went through all of it with Christien, how sometimes you want to make the blood a little ...
CHRISTIEN TINSLEY: Thicker, so it flows out of the skin a little bit slower.
JAD: Sometimes you need it to splash around, or sometimes you need ...
CHRISTIEN TINSLEY: More opaque blood, black blood, clear blood, green blood, vibrant blood, dark blood.
ROBERT: Do they have catalogs?
CHRISTIEN TINSLEY: There are catalogs for blood.
JAD: 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.
CHRISTIEN TINSLEY: We might throw a material called Methocel into it. It's a thickening agent, very similar to what they use in jelly donuts. We use silicas.
JAD: 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.
CHRISTIEN TINSLEY: Everything is synthetic.
JAD: It's just a bunch of chemicals that had nothing to do with the inside of a human body.
CHRISTIEN TINSLEY: Yeah.
JAD: But then, a funny thing happened.
JAD: Now when would you use, say, the condom full of blood here?
JAD: Christien had walked us over to a table where he laid out a bunch of his tools.
JAD: When would that come into ...?
CHRISTIEN TINSLEY: Well, yeah. What you're seeing here is you're seeing a table full of tricks. We have the bladder on the knife.
JAD: And he showed us this trick knife. Super dull, but on the back of it, it had this little tube.
CHRISTIEN TINSLEY: And the tube runs along the back end and around the edge of the knife.
JAD: 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 chintziest trick I've ever seen.
CHRISTIEN TINSLEY: But it's a classic approach. Somebody gets cut on film, you're doing ...
JAD: But I thought, "Let's just try it."
JAD: Can I ...
CHRISTIEN TINSLEY: A surgery scene, where ...
JAD: Can I slice Robert across the face?

CHRISTIEN TINSLEY: You certainly can. So what we'll do ...
JAD: So he fills the syringe with Bloody Real Blood. I get in position, holding the knife.

JAD: It's not because I hate you right now.
ROBERT: I know.
JAD: It's because we're doing a ritual. We're gonna be blood brothers. Okay, ready? Here we go. One, two, three.
CHRISTIEN TINSLEY: You got the camera?
ELLEN HORNE: Wait, wait.
JAD: And this is the fakest trick I have ever seen. I think I've said that already, but it's worth repeating. It's so fake. And yet ...

CHRISTIEN TINSLEY: There we go. Give it a good steady squeeze. Okay?
JAD: ... when the Bloody Real Blood comes out ...
CHRISTIEN TINSLEY: And that's basically ... [laughs]
JAD: Oh, that was thrilling and terrifying. I feel ...
JAD: And I was like, "Why am I getting woozy?"
JAD: Oh my God. My hand is shaking.
ROBERT: Did you feel anything?
ELLEN: I feel light-headed when I see it.
JAD: Ellen, too.
ELLEN: I guess you can't be very ...
JAD: Okay, now I really am feeling light-theaded. That ...
JAD: I actually had to sit down.
ELLEN: Reactive to ...
ROBERT: Oh wow!
JAD: Oh my God.
ROBERT: It really looks real!
JAD: And it was like, whatever. But it just didn't make any sense.
CHRISTIEN TINSLEY: 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.
JAD: Today on Radiolab ...
ROBERT: Continuously flowing information about ...
JAD: Blood.
ROBERT: Real Bloody Real Blood.
JAD: Royal blood.
ROBERT: Bad blood.
JAD: Young blood.
ROBERT: And blood money.
CHRISTIEN TINSLEY: You know, it's business.
JAD: I'm Jad Abumrad.
ROBERT: I'm Robert Krulwich.
JAD: This is Radiolab. Let's get bloody!
[ARCHIVE CLIP, Barton Beneš: I never thought I would become a terrorist. [laughs] That's what I became. That's what they called me.]
JAD: So we're gonna start with a story about that guy you just heard.
ROBERT: His name was Barton Beneš. He was an artist working in New York in the West Village in Manhattan in the '70s, '80s and early '90s. Pretty successful.
JAD: And famously social.
JOE LOVETT: Oh my God.
JAD: Not by any means your normal terrorist.
JOE LOVETT: I mean, he was just the most charming, welcoming, open, beguiling person you could possibly imagine.
JAD: Although given the story we're about to tell, he was also a bit of a prankster.
[ARCHIVE CLIP, Barton Beneš: I deal with fear, people's fears.]
JOE LOVETT: And he was nuts, which was a lot of fun.
BARTON BENES: And by the way, that is Barton's best friend, Joe.
JOE LOVETT: Joe Lovett, director and producer. We were very, very close friends. We talked almost every day.
JAD: And Joe says they actually began most days by calling each other up and hurling insults.
JOE LOVETT: Until we were laughing hysterically.
[ARCHIVE CLIP, Barton Beneš: You going?]
[ARCHIVE CLIP, Joe Lovett: Yeah.]
[ARCHIVE CLIP, Barton Beneš: Really?]
[ARCHIVE CLIP, Joe Lovett: Really.]
[ARCHIVE CLIP, Barton Beneš: Am I that lucky? [laughs]]
ROBERT: 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.
[ARCHIVE CLIP, Barton Beneš: Hey, welcome to the catacombs. My 10-room mansion. This is the cabinet of curiosities.]
JOE LOVETT: It was a magnificent place. I did a film on it, actually. When you walk into it ...
[ARCHIVE CLIP, Barton Beneš: My African collections.]
JOE LOVETT: It was filled with drawers of spiders.
[ARCHIVE CLIP, Barton Beneš: A bowl from Pamplona.]
JOE LOVETT: Voodoo totems.
[ARCHIVE CLIP, Barton Beneš: I even have an outhouse here.]
JOE LOVETT: Desiccated animals, beaded pieces of bears and wolves and birds.
JAD: In one drawer, he had human ashes. In another ...
JOE LOVETT: And ...
ROBERT: Fat from a liposuction.
JOE LOVETT: Yeah.
JAD: Old poop.
[ARCHIVE CLIP, Barton Beneš: 25 million year old feces, fossilized.]
LAUREL REUTER: I mean, anything he could find that was weird.
ROBERT: That's Laurel Reuter, one of Barton's friends.
LAUREL REUTER: That was taboo.
ROBERT: For example, in another cabinet he had Adolf Hitler's teaspoon.
JAD: A severed human toe?
JOE LOVETT: Someone had been walking across—it was either Brooklyn or the Williamsburg Bridge.
[ARCHIVE CLIP, Barton Beneš: And he called me up and he said, "I found a toe."]
JOE LOVETT: And they thought, "Well, Barton would be the person to give it to."

JAD: [laughs]
LAUREL REUTER: He mummified it and kept it.
[ARCHIVE CLIP, Barton Beneš: People do bring you things.]
JOE LOVETT: Oh, people sent him Madonna's underpants.
JAD: What?
JOE LOVETT: Yes. People sent him Nancy Reagan's lipstick on a napkin from Texas, I think. Somebody sent him Sylvester Stallone's urine.
JAD: Ooh!
ROBERT: How did they collect that?
JOE LOVETT: They cared so much about Barton that when Stallone peed in this urinal in a restaurant and didn't flush, they went and got it.
JAD: And although his apartment was filled with every different taboo, button-pushing, weirdness that you could imagine ...
ROBERT: The one area he didn't touch, at least not at first, was the thing that haunted his life the most.
[ARCHIVE CLIP, Barton Beneš: I never knew what to do about AIDS. It was a hard subject for me. You know, I was positive and my boyfriend had died, and it was something I couldn't deal with. I couldn't make art about it.]
ROBERT: But then one day ...
LAUREL REUTER: One day, he was in his kitchen cooking. He was a good cook, and he always cooked when we came to visit.
[ARCHIVE CLIP, Barton Beneš: I was in the kitchen cutting parsley, and I cut a piece of my finger.]
LAUREL REUTER: He cut himself.
[ARCHIVE CLIP, Barton Beneš: And blood went all over the kitchen.]
LAUREL REUTER: And he went into this huge panic.
[ARCHIVE CLIP, Barton Beneš: And I was so freaked out.]
ROBERT: The story goes Barton immediately thought ...
LAUREL REUTER: Oh my god, I'm gonna get AIDS!
ROBERT: But then in the next blink, he thought, "Well, wait a second."
LAUREL REUTER: Oh, I already have it. It's my own blood. It can't hurt me.
JAD: Wait, what?
JOE LOVETT: He sort of forgot that he had it himself.
JAD: But wait. I don't understand that, though. So he had AIDS.
JOE LOVETT: Oh yeah.
JAD: He knew he had AIDS.
JOE LOVETT: Oh yeah.
JAD: 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.
[ARCHIVE CLIP, Barton Beneš: 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."]
JOE LOVETT: 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.
JAD: They were scared to go in?
JOE LOVETT: Terrified. Everybody was terrified.
ROBERT: And I remember they used to have these things on the door.
JOE LOVETT: Mm-hmm.
ROBERT: "Beware."
JOE LOVETT: AIDS contaminated.
ROBERT: Because of the blood.
JOE LOVETT: Yeah.
JAD: It's hard to overstate just how frightening blood was in this moment.
JOE LOVETT: Nobody knew what anything was going on. There were conspiracy theories. There were thoughts that people were being poisoned.
JAD: All anyone knew was that people were dying, and it was because of something in the blood.
JOE LOVETT: 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.

JAD: So Barton ...
[ARCHIVE CLIP, Barton Beneš: I never knew what to do about AIDS. And it was something I couldn't deal with.]
JAD: ... 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.
ROBERT: Well, he has an idea.
[ARCHIVE CLIP, Barton Beneš: And I start making these weapons.]
JAD: The idea sounded simple.
JOE LOVETT: A series of works called Lethal Weapons.
JAD: Except they weren't very lethal-looking.
ROBERT: Like, he took a little toy gun.
LAUREL REUTER: A child's squirt gun.
ROBERT: One of those candy yellow toy guns.
LAUREL REUTER: And he put his own blood inside of the squirt gun.
JOE LOVETT: He had pacifiers with blood. Baby pacifiers with blood. Nursing bottles with blood.
ROBERT: One of those clown lapel flowers that squirt water? Well, his squirted blood.
JOE LOVETT: Atomizers, perfume atomizers with blood.
JAD: You can go ...
JOE LOVETT: Yep. Exactly.
JAD: 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!
[ARCHIVE CLIP, Barton Beneš: I deal with fear. People's fears. [laughs]]
JOE LOVETT: And this one is what he called a Poison Dart.
JAD: Joe has one of the Lethal Weapons in his living room.
JOE LOVETT: What it is, is it's a hypodermic needle.
ROBERT: Very thin and long.
JOE LOVETT: That had been filled up with his blood.
ROBERT: And then he put these delicate little ...
JOE LOVETT: Feathers from an African bird.
JAD: On the back of the needle to make it look like one of those poison darts from an old James Bond movie.
JOE LOVETT: Right. [laughs]
JAD: So Barton initially shows the work to Laurel, who mounts an exhibition at her gallery in North Dakota. And then ...
LAUREL REUTER: Then the show, it was—it went to Sweden.
JAD: And that's where things got interesting.
INGER TORNBERG: It was extraordinary. [laughs]
ROBERT: That's Inger Tornberg. She ran the gallery in Lund, in Sweden, where the Lethal Weapons landed. And she says within a day or two of the show opening ...
INGER TORNBERG: The authorities were here telling me to close the doors. That by law ...
JAD: They had to.
INGER TORNBERG: For the safety of people coming into the gallery. We felt ashamed.
JAD: She thought, "This is Lund. We're a university town. We should know better."
ROBERT: Well, wait a second. Did you know for certainty that their fears were ridiculous?
INGER TORNBERG: 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.
ROBERT: So she told the authorities ...
INGER TORNBERG: Take it easy. Don't do anything.
JAD: No one's gonna get hurt. The blood is behind glass.
INGER TORNBERG: But the other thing that happened is after the ban, flyers came out saying that we were selling HIV-contaminated blood by the liter.
ROBERT: [laughs] Whose flyers were these?
INGER TORNBERG: The morning and evening newspapers.
JAD: Wow!
INGER TORNBERG: We didn't know where the information came from. Must have come from the health authority.
JAD: But suddenly, she says, the whole town of Lund exploded. She had people coming into the gallery, yelling ...
INGER TORNBERG: This is not art.
JAD: ... "How dare you?"
INGER TORNBERG: And you sell it for money? What is this? We were overwhelmed.
ROBERT: So they struck a deal with the health authorities.
INGER TORNBERG: A compromise.
JAD: 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 ..."
INGER TORNBERG: An oven. Heat all them up.
ROBERT: At 160 degrees Fahrenheit for two hours.
INGER TORNBERG: And thus kill everything possible.
JAD: That's—can I just say that's awesome? That's ...
ROBERT: Weren't you worried that the paper would curl? Or the glass would ...
INGER TORNBERG: Well, the plastic would melt in the oven.
[ARCHIVE CLIP, Barton Beneš: And then each work had a certificate saying it was safe to sell. I never thought I would become a terrorist. That's what I became. They called it The AIDS Horror Show.]
JAD: All right. So the interesting thing—I don't know if you felt this way, but over the last few decades, AIDS has become a little bit less horrible.

ROBERT: Mm-hmm.

JAD: Just a little.
ROBERT: Yeah.
JAD: So you would think those Lethal Weapons pieces, like that poison dart that we saw in Joe's living room, that it would lose its punch a little bit.
ROBERT: After all these years.
JAD: 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.
ROBERT: Right.
JAD: But weirdly that that doesn't happen with that piece.
JOE LOVETT: I still think it's an extremely powerful piece. And I think all those blood pieces are. They're really shocking.
JAD: Well, what's the power now?
JOE LOVETT: 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.
JAD: I mean, he's right. Like, you see that blood, that's a man's viscera. It's not just art. And that guy's gone, so it's kind of ghostly in a way.
LAUREL REUTER: We had a wonderful goodbye.
JAD: That's Laurel again.
LAUREL REUTER: 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.
JAD: Laurel says that even at the end, when he was in really bad shape ...
LAUREL REUTER: He—he was still like a little child. His point of view of the world was full of glee and delight.
JAD: 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.
ROBERT: As if the thing that scares you most is also so absurdly frightening that you laugh at the same time.
JAD: Yeah. As Inger Tornberg put it, Barton had kind of made himself ...
INGER TORNBERG: Sort of skinless, in some way.
ROBERT: Hmm.

JAD: Yeah.

ROBERT: Hmm.
INGER TORNBERG: It's a very generous offer to anybody who is receptive enough to take it.
ROBERT: 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."
JAD: Before we go to break, big thanks to Kelsey Padgett for production help on that piece.
[LISTENER: This is Chad Kaneky calling you from my living room in Cincinnati, Ohio. Radiolab 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.]
JAD: Hey, I'm Jad Abumrad.
ROBERT: I'm Robert Krulwich.
JAD: This is Radiolab. Today ...
ROBERT: Blood. 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.
JAD: This is pre drawing blood? Or post?
ROBERT: This was as they were drawing blood.
JAD: Oh, you were holding vials of your own blood as it was coming out of you?
ROBERT: Yes. They kept handing me the vials without capping them. And I fainted, so my hand flew up and all that blood and all—it poured over my face and my shirt and my clothes. And when I came to, everyone was screaming, including half of the waiting room.
JAD: You were covered in your own blood?
ROBERT: Covered in blood.
JAD: Your whole shirt was soaked in blood?
ROBERT: Oh yeah.
JAD: That's disgusting.
ROBERT: The undershirt, everything.
JAD: That's disgusting!
ROBERT: Well, it's only disgusting because you think—because you're just—we're all unfamiliar with blood, but back in the 1600s ...
JAMES SHAPIRO: It's just part of life. For Shakespeare, blood was blood.
ROBERT: 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 ...
JAMES SHAPIRO: You know the smell of blood. What do I mean? Young Shakespeare, he's a kid.
ROBERT: He grew up in Stratford, and at 21 he went to London.
JAMES SHAPIRO: He came as an actor, and probably as the youngest actor in the company. What he was sent to do is to go to the shambles ...
ROBERT: That's a slaughterhouse.
JAMES SHAPIRO: ... a block and a half 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.
ROBERT: Really?
JAMES SHAPIRO: Absolutely.
ROBERT: They didn't use fake blood?
JAMES SHAPIRO: No fake—why fake blood? How do you get fake blood? You gotta make fake blood. You just walk two blocks on the way from where he lived to the theater. He's gonna 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 Antony 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 the elbows. So there is blood in this play.
ROBERT: In all of the plays, the comedies, the romances, the histories, all of them.
JAMES SHAPIRO: I have some numbers for you that shocked me.
ROBERT: Numbers?
JAMES SHAPIRO: Numbers.
ROBERT: Numbers of what?
JAMES SHAPIRO: Numbers of references to blood.
ROBERT: Really?
JAMES SHAPIRO: So the word "blood" itself occurs 673 times in 571 speeches in 41 of Shakespeare's plays and poems, which means almost every play and poem.
ROBERT: Now should I be impressed? Because does the word "house" appear nine thousand six hundred and ...

JAMES SHAPIRO: No, this is a big word. This is a word that recurs 37 times in King John.
[ARCHIVE CLIP: March to the marketplace in Frenchmen's blood.]
[ARCHIVE CLIP: Lusty blood again, which we ...]
[ARCHIVE CLIP: Living blood doth in these temples beat.]
JAMES SHAPIRO: 28 times in Richard III.
[ARCHIVE CLIP: One raised in blood, and one in blood ...]
[ARCHIVE CLIP: In that congealed mouths and bleed ...]
[ARCHIVE CLIP: ... of that royal blood.]
JAMES SHAPIRO: 22 times in Henry IV, Part One.
[ARCHIVE CLIP: ... lips with her own children's blood.]
JAMES SHAPIRO: It means a lot of different things. It means I'm of good blood, I'm of high social station.
ROBERT: And of course, there was bad blood or cursed blood or being hot-blooded or cold-blooded.
JAMES SHAPIRO: And sometimes, as in Macbeth, it just means blood.
[ARCHIVE CLIP: Blood will have blood. I am in blood stepped in so far—blood is stopped, the very source of—the handsome places were all badged with blood. His silver skin laced with his golden blood.]
JAMES SHAPIRO: He's wading. He feels he is wading 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 Lucrece.
ROBERT: Lucrece is the good wife of a very honorable man. She's raped by this son of a tyrant. He comes from the ruling family, the Tarquins, so he thinks he can get away with this.
JAMES SHAPIRO: But Lucrece takes a knife at the end of this poem and stabs herself. So this is what happens. "The murderous knife, and, 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." That's a lot of blood. "Some of her blood still pure and red remain'd,

And some look'd black, and that false Tarquin stain'd." So we're beginning to see that two kinds of blood are flowing out of her.

ROBERT: And that false Tarquin stain ...
JAMES SHAPIRO: Yeah.
ROBERT: That's the raping? That's the ...
JAMES SHAPIRO: Tarquin is the guy who raped her, and from that rape, her blood got polluted.
ROBERT: She now has two pools of blood. His dark and dangerous, hers red and pure.
JAMES SHAPIRO: And you can see this. This is a culture that understood putrefied blood looked a little off, looked a little black. And this is ...
ROBERT: And this was meant to be thought of as literal, so that if you were raped, that's what your—your blood would change color in part, in the bad part.
JAMES SHAPIRO: How do you prove intent in rape? You know, Tarquin's saying she wanted it, how would you know?
ROBERT: Would this be almost like forensic? Would this be evidence?
JAMES SHAPIRO: 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 ...
ROBERT: Blood was the thing that makes you you.
JAMES SHAPIRO: ... life, death, kinship ties, and what is within you, what circulates within you. Your character.
JAD: So blood was like essence.
ROBERT: Yeah.
JAD: All right. Well, if Shakespeare saw blood as like your essential nature, well this next story is about what happens when that idea collided with science.
EDWARD DOLNICK: Yeah. How are we doing?
JAD: And to sort through the debris of this collision ...
EDWARD DOLNICK: Talking, talking, talking.
JAD: ... we talked with science journalist ...
EDWARD DOLNICK: Okay. I'm Edward Dolnick, the author of the Clockwork Universe.
JAD: A great read that opens right where our story begins.
EDWARD DOLNICK: So it's 1660.
JAD: England.
EDWARD DOLNICK: 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.
JAD: People are just beginning to tinker and fiddle with nature. And in London, much of this tinkering went on in a rundown mansion.
EDWARD DOLNICK: Every third Wednesday, some schedule like that, you would see this strange collection of men.
JAD: Known as the Royal Society.
EDWARD DOLNICK: Coming in to the Royal Society quarters.
JAD: Were they like the National Science Foundation of their day? Or just like a club?
EDWARD DOLNICK: 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 tuned 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. People were thrilled at this time with experiments in general. And it didn't have to be a lot. Lighting firecrackers 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.
JAD: And one question which endlessly fascinated these guys—lucky for us—was a simple one: what is blood?
EDWARD DOLNICK: 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 they're 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.
JAD: So here was the first experiment.
EDWARD DOLNICK: Question number one. What would happen ...
JAD: If you took a madman ...
EDWARD DOLNICK: This mad fellow ...
JAD: A guy who was prone ...
EDWARD DOLNICK: To fits, to carrying on.
JAD: And you took this guy and you filled him up with the blood of a sheep.
EDWARD DOLNICK: And a sheep is famously docile, of course.
JAD: What would happen? Would that docile sheep blood get inside the madman and tame him?
EDWARD DOLNICK: Soothe his raging fits?
JAD: So the Royal Society ran some ads.
EDWARD DOLNICK: Can we find somebody to do this? We'll pay you a guinea, which is ...
JAD: A few bucks today.
EDWARD DOLNICK: That is to say worth having but not a fortune. And they're delighted to find this fellow, Koga, Arthur Koga, because he's like the Mad Hatter or something.
JAD: Like what we would, these days, call schizophrenic? Or I mean, was he crazy in that way, or just eccentric?
EDWARD DOLNICK: 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 ...
JAD: He's the guy on the subway.
EDWARD DOLNICK: Right.

ROBERT: [laughs]
JAD: In any case, on the day of the experiment, they bring Koga into the Royal Society and into the big theater there.
EDWARD DOLNICK: And it is a full room. There are wooden bleachers, and everyone's 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.
JAD: They sit Koga right next to the sheep.
EDWARD DOLNICK: The sheep is tied down, and they cut a slit.
JAD: A tiny one right across an artery in the sheep's neck.
EDWARD DOLNICK: And our man, Arthur Koga ...
JAD: They have him ...
EDWARD DOLNICK: Put his arm on the table, and they cut open a vein of his. And now they take a skinny little metal tube and they run it between the two.
JAD: So that blood goes from the sheep's neck into the man's arm and back. And then they wait. And wait. And wait.
ROBERT: Well, how long would you think you'd have to wait for a madman to become sheep-like in his personality change?
EDWARD DOLNICK: Well, I guess they had waited for him to spring up from the table. And—but there is no baa-ing. There is no sudden coming to his senses, but nobody drops dead. And that counts as a success.
JAD: And they thought, "You know, maybe we're just not getting at this the right way."
EDWARD DOLNICK: 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?
JAD: And in fact, around that time ...
EDWARD DOLNICK: The eminent scientist of the day, this great figure ...
JAD: ... a guy by the name of Robert Boyle ...
EDWARD DOLNICK: ... proposed 16 experiments that they ought to do.
JAD: Now there are no records of the experimental results, but we can pretty much imagine how it went.
EDWARD DOLNICK: Number one, the blood of a cowardly dog.
JAD: Put that into a ...
EDWARD DOLNICK: Fierce dog.
JAD: Let's see if that makes the fierce dog ...
EDWARD DOLNICK: More tame. So they try that. And that doesn't work.
JAD: Okay.
EDWARD DOLNICK: 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?
JAD: And that? No.

EDWARD DOLNICK: No. That didn't work.
JAD: Fine.
EDWARD DOLNICK: 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?
JAD: And no.
EDWARD DOLNICK: No, it turns out. Boyle tries variation after variation of this, and to cut to the chase, none of them with any useful result.
JAD: And it was around this time, if you ask historians, 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?
EDWARD DOLNICK: The experiments sound to us absolutely ludicrous.
JAD: And of course, they are.
EDWARD DOLNICK: Except they were on to something.
SAUL VILLEDA: She's transferring me, so that another one of her colleagues can also ...
LYNN LEVY: All right. Saul, can you hear me?
SAUL VILLEDA: Yeah, I can hear you.
LYNN: Sweet.
JAD: 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.
LYNN: Right. So I called up one of the researchers.
SAUL VILLEDA: So my name's Saul Villeda, and I'm a faculty fellow here at UCSF. So I just started my own lab.
LYNN: You have your own lab? Is it like—it's the Saul Lab?
SAUL VILLEDA: It's the Villeda Lab, yeah.
LYNN: You're still pretty young, right?
SAUL VILLEDA: Yeah. I'm 32.
LYNN: So Saul does experiments with mice.
JAD: Okay.
LYNN: And there's one thing that you need to know about mice, just to understand this whole thing.
JAD: Which is what?
SAUL VILLEDA: Mice really hate water.
LYNN: You throw them in the water ...
SAUL VILLEDA: They want to get out of there as fast as possible.
LYNN: 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 ...
SAUL VILLEDA: Take a big pool of water.
LYNN: And you build a maze in it.
SAUL VILLEDA: A water maze?
LYNN: You know, it's like a mouse-sized maze.
SAUL VILLEDA: And then we actually put a platform in the pool.
LYNN: Somewhere under the water. You know, the mouse can't see it, doesn't know it's there. If you were a mouse, and you stumble across this platform, you're like, "Oh, I can totally use this."
SAUL VILLEDA: To get out of the water.
LYNN: Which I don't like at all. So I'm very excited about this platform.
JAD: Because you can rest.
LYNN: You could rest.
JAD: So wait. Why do they do this to the mice?
LYNN: The point is, like, you want to see how fast the mice can learn and remember where the platform is.
JAD: So it's like a learning test.
LYNN: It's a learning and memory test. And what you do is ...
SAUL VILLEDA: You keep dropping them into the pool.
LYNN: Over and over, and you just see how long it takes them, you know, to learn where the platform is.
SAUL VILLEDA: Exactly.
LYNN: 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.
SAUL VILLEDA: A young animal gets it. They figure it out much faster.
LYNN: Once they've done it a couple of times ...
SAUL VILLEDA: Let's say after, you know, the sixth or seventh time that you drop them in there.
LYNN: They're like, straight, stop, left, right.
SAUL VILLEDA: Got it.
LYNN: They go straight to it.
SAUL VILLEDA: But the old guys, they don't do that.
LYNN: So what does it look like if you drop an old mouse?

SAUL VILLEDA: Oh ...

LYNN: According to Saul, no matter how many times you run an old mouse through the maze ...
SAUL VILLEDA: No matter what you do to them, they're just not getting better.
LYNN: So it's like, "Do I go left here? Right? I'm pretty sure it was right last time. Why did they make it like this?"

JAD: [laughs]
SAUL VILLEDA: It's really hard. But that's where the blood came in.
LYNN: So Saul had an idea that was kind of similar to Boyle's 350 years ago.
SAUL VILLEDA: This is 1600?
LYNN: Although Saul didn't actually know about any of those old experiments. I gave him a copy of the paper.
SAUL VILLEDA: That's crazy. I'm gonna keep this.
LYNN: Anyway, his new but old question was this ...
SAUL VILLEDA: Well, what happens if you mix young and old blood? Does this affect learning and memory?
LYNN: 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.
JAD: Wait. So he put old blood in young mice?
SAUL VILLEDA: Yes. And then we did all the tests.
LYNN: You know, drop them in the pool, the whole thing.
JAD: And what happened?
LYNN: Well, all of a sudden ...
SAUL VILLEDA: They did much worse. The young animal looked a lot more like an old guy.
LYNN: Suddenly, this young mouse was just wandering around the maze all confused, you know, like an old mouse.
SAUL VILLEDA: Not quite as bad, but pretty close.
LYNN: No idea where he is, no idea where the platform is.
SAUL VILLEDA: The old blood really did impair learning and memory.
ROBERT: Wow!
SAUL VILLEDA: Isn't that crazy?
ROBERT: Yeah. What's—is there something in the blood that would change the mental state of the recipient?
JAD: What was the blood doing?
SAUL VILLEDA: A good question. So we ...
LYNN: 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.
SAUL VILLEDA: It went both ways, yeah.
LYNN: And at the end of the experiment, instead of looking at behavior ...
SAUL VILLEDA: We looked at the brain.
LYNN: See, they were looking at a part of the brain that specializes in learning and memory, and they were looking for a very specific thing.
SAUL VILLEDA: Brand new baby neurons.
LYNN: See, when you're young, as you learn things, your brain makes lots and lots of baby neurons, but as you get older ...
ROBERT: Not so much.
LYNN: 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, sliced their brains real thin.
SAUL VILLEDA: Thinner than a slice of paper.
LYNN: And went hunting for baby neurons.
SAUL VILLEDA: So I counted all of these in a microscope, right? So literally with a little clicker, I just ...
LYNN: So wait, you're clicking every time you see a new ...
SAUL VILLEDA: A new neuron. Like, click, click, click, click, click.
LYNN: Apparently, when you zoom in on one of these little neurons ...
SAUL VILLEDA: They look like little trees, really, when you're looking at them.
LYNN: So little tree, click. Little tree, click.
SAUL VILLEDA: Over hours and hours and hours.
LYNN: Until finally one night, pretty late ...
SAUL VILLEDA: It was, I think, one or two in the morning.
LYNN: ... he gets his first look at the results.
SAUL VILLEDA: In a young animal, it was about a 25 percent decrease in those baby neurons.
LYNN: Was it dramatic?
SAUL VILLEDA: Oh yeah. I mean, you could see it.
LYNN: 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.

JAD: Huh.

LYNN: Now in the old mice ...
SAUL VILLEDA: Normally, in an old animal, you're hard-pressed to find a handful of these cells.
LYNN: But after the old guys had been filled up with this young blood ...
SAUL VILLEDA: All of a sudden, we were getting, you know, maybe two or three times as many new neurons as we had seen before.
ROBERT: Two or three times as many?
SAUL VILLEDA: And they looked better. They looked longer, and they looked a lot more like the young neurons did.
ROBERT: Jad?
JAD: [laughs]
ROBERT: Come a little closer.
JAD: Stay away from me!
ROBERT: So does this mean what it sounds like it means? Like, I get the young blood and suddenly I can finish the day with my gloves, umbrella, and my keys all in my right hand pockets?
JAD: You mean instead of losing them on the 1 Train?
ROBERT: Yeah.
LYNN: Maybe, but we're not at all ready to say that yet.
SAUL VILLEDA: Not yet.
LYNN: 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?

LYNN: I feel like if you come out with a result that says yes, you can find—you can do the water maze better if you're full of young blood, like ...
SAUL VILLEDA: Crazy, right?
LYNN: Yeah. It's crazy and it freaks me out a little bit. Like, I feel like old women are gonna be buying vials of baby blood.
SAUL VILLEDA: You sound like my mother.

LYNN: [laughs]

SAUL VILLEDA: 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.
LYNN: Oh!
SAUL VILLEDA: She's like, "Mijo, be careful. Be careful!"
LYNN: Because?
SAUL VILLEDA: Well, she's worried that all of a sudden, 16-year-olds are gonna go missing. [laughs]
LYNN: Don't you worry about that? That seems to be ...
SAUL VILLEDA: No.
LYNN: That does seem to be the logical extension of this, though.
SAUL VILLEDA: Oh, man. You really do sound like my mom.
ROBERT: But they are at least sure that it is the introduction of the new blood that is the agent of change here?
LYNN: 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 Wager is one of the people who worked on it. I went to visit her at her lab in Cambridge.
LYNN: I'm from WNYC Radio in New York.
LYNN: And one of Amy's assistants, Danica, showed me this tiny little vial.
LYNN: Wow, this is really frozen.
DANICA: It's minus 80 degrees Celsius.
LYNN: It had a protein in it that they got out of the blood, a very special protein.
LYNN: Oh boy.
LYNN: Called GDF11.
LYNN: So you've just opened the freezer, and it's crusted in ice. And you're taking out a little red box. What do you got?
DANICA: That's what it looks like. GDF11 in a vial. So it's basically the purified protein that we keep at minus 80.
LYNN: 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—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.
LYNN: It looks like absolutely nothing.
DANICA: Exactly. That's pretty much it. So you can see the frozen liquid at the bottom. That's really it.
LYNN: So that's a very important little thing in that vial that looks like nothing.
DANICA: Exactly. It regenerates many systems, so—yep.
LYNN: So that's the research being done in Boston, right?
JAD: Uh-huh.
LYNN: It's beeping because it's angry?
DANICA: Yes. Going up in temperature, so ...
LYNN: 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—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.
JAD: Wow!
LYNN: Yeah.
JAD: So there's 100,000 different agents in there doing something?
LYNN: Yeah.
JAD: Producer Lynn Levy.
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JAD: Three, two, one. Hey, I'm Jad Abumrad.
ROBERT: And I'm Robert Krulwich.
JAD: This is Radiolab. And today, blood.
WOMAN: I'm told we're gonna get some pretty cool donors today. So here we go.
JAD: All right. So there are places in the country where people give a lot of blood, like Minneapolis, Minnesota or Columbus, Ohio.
MAN: All right. That one goes in the paper bag here.
JAD: Where if you go to a blood drive—and we did ...
MAN: Hey.
WOMAN: Hey.
MAN: And today's date and a phone number on there is all.
JAD: ... you'll find a really comforting scene.
MAN: We got a ...
JAD: People with busy lives taking a moment to walk into a cubicle room, sit down with some nurses.
NURSE: Allergies to iodine at all?
MAN: No.
JAD: Stick out their arms.
NURSE: All right. You ready for the fun part here?
MAN: Yes.
JAD: And ...
NURSE: 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?
WOMAN: I'm super excited.
JAD: And ...
NURSE: Now's the time to look away if you do not like to watch. Beautiful.
WOMAN: Okay. That kind of hurt.
NURSE: It did hurt?
WOMAN: Yeah.
NURSE: Oh, I'm sorry!
WOMAN: It's okay.
JAD: And one by one, they drain their own blood. Sometimes a double dose ...
WOMAN: You give double the amount?

MAN: Yeah.
JAD: Like this guy.
MAN: I do feel a little woozy.
JAD: All to help strangers they will never meet. And if you ask these folks ...
WOMAN: Why do you donate?
JAD: ... you'll get the answers you expect and that you hope for. Well, because ...
MAN: Why wouldn't you? It's selfish not to.
JAD: ... it's the right thing to do.
MAN: Being healthy, I have a responsibility.
MAN: I thought about a person in need in the hospital.
WOMAN: My mom used to work in 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.
JAD: I mean, the simple point is that giving blood is a gift, right?
WOMAN: It's the most selfless thing you can do. It's the most loving thing you can do.
JAD: It's the gift of life.
WOMAN: You can't give any greater gift than that.
JAD: 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 ...
SOREN WHEELER: And if that long needle is named Molly Webster. [laughs]
JAD: And Soren Wheeler. You will find that the reality is way more ...
SOREN: Complicated.
MOLLY WEBSTER: Way more complicated.
GIL GAUL: Okay. This is them. This is Gil Gaul.
SOREN: We should just say first of all that this whole story started for us with this guy. Gil Gaul, he's a longtime newspaper reporter.
GIL GAUL: And now I'm retired, and I write books.
MOLLY: Gilbert Gaul, retired newspaper man.
GIL GAUL: Right. I worked 40 years in newspapers.
SOREN: And the story that Gil ran into actually started back in the late 1980s.
GIL GAUL: What happened was the Red Cross would come to our office ...
SOREN: To do blood drives.
GIL GAUL: And I literally was giving blood one day ...
MOLLY: Sitting in the chair with the needle in his arm ...
GIL GAUL: ... and the blood was draining out of my arm into the bag.
SOREN: And a very simple question popped into his head.
GIL GAUL: I wonder what happens to this stuff after it gets into this bag? Who knows why I was thinking this? I certainly don't remember, but I suggested to Craig Stock, my editor, hey, why don't we just do a little explainer about blood for a Sunday piece?
SOREN: Just a short little thing about what happens to the blood, how it's processed, where it ends up.
GIL GAUL: He 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? [laughs] And 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.
SOREN: 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 ...
SCOTT CARNEY: Hospital contracts.
GIL GAUL: Money and salaries. Strategic business and economics.
SCOTT CARNEY: Pharmaceuticals.
GIL GAUL: Production.
SCOTT CARNEY: Verbal assaults.
GIL GAUL: Competition.
SCOTT CARNEY: Enterprise.
GIL GAUL: I absolutely had moments when I would sit back and say, "Oh my God, I can't believe this is going on."
JAD: What? What is he talking about?
MOLLY: We're gonna tell you in one second, maybe two minutes. But first, you should know that historically, there's always been a tension in the way we think about blood.
JAD: Tension?
MOLLY: Yeah. So I'm gonna rewind.
SCOTT CARNEY: When blood was first being used, it was during war times, during World War I.
MOLLY: That's Scott Carney. He's the author of the book The Red Market.
SCOTT CARNEY: And it hit big business in the Battle of Pembrey.
MOLLY: And that was the very first time medics realized they could use preserved blood, have it on the battlefield at the ready anytime they wanted it.
SCOTT CARNEY: So you could keep your troops alive longer if you had blood available.
MOLLY: Still, the blood didn't last very long, and the process of giving blood was pretty gruesome and painful. But by World War II and into the Korean War, we'd gotten much better at storing and transporting blood. And giving blood was less painful, which meant people back home could get involved.
SCOTT CARNEY: What happens is there are these massive ramp-ups ...
[ARCHIVE CLIP, advertisement: You can give these men the gift of life, a pint of your blood.]
SCOTT CARNEY: ... to get blood to the battlefield.
[ARCHIVE CLIP, advertisement: The Department of Defense is calling for all Americans to roll up their sleeves. There is no ...]
DOUGLAS STARR: For the first time, you saw these amazing magazine advertisements, showing a soldier on one knee holding his rifle, and it says, "He gave his blood. Will you give yours?"
MOLLY: That's Douglas Starr, author of the book, Blood.
DOUGLAS STARR: An epic history of medicine and commerce.
SCOTT CARNEY: In Britain, there was this idea, you know, we're being bombed. 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 was 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 ...
MOLLY: Anywhere from 15 to 40 bucks.
SCOTT CARNEY: ... for your blood.
JAD: Really?
DOUGLAS STARR: Yeah. All over the country, usually in the skid rows ...
SCOTT CARNEY: These skid row, shanty towns.
DOUGLAS STARR: People were 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 could imagine the population they attracted.

MOLLY: According to one eyewitness account ...
SCOTT CARNEY: 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 ...
SOREN: Actually, probably worse than my first college apartment.
MOLLY: Yeah. I know. I was like worms on the floor? I don't know where you were living, Scott, but worms weren't really the problem. I mean, on the one hand, these paid places ...
SCOTT CARNEY: Got a lot of blood. The volumes were quite high.
MOLLY: But pretty quickly, doctors and hospitals, they started to notice that ...
SCOTT CARNEY: That paid blood is lower quality than altruistic-given blood.
MOLLY: Because you're attracting people who are down and out.
SCOTT CARNEY: Might have disease.
DOUGLAS STARR: A lot of infections. A lot of hepatitis.
MOLLY: And if they were sick, they'd still want to get paid, so they'd lie about it.
SCOTT CARNEY: Prisoners were giving blood. The state of Arkansas funded its whole prison system on blood sales.
DOUGLAS STARR: And of course, everybody from the blood bankers to clergypeople are saying this is obscene. There is something sacred about blood. It's not a commodity. It's a holy substance.
MOLLY: 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.
SCOTT CARNEY: 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.
JAD: So today, there's no more paid blood?
MOLLY: No paid blood.
JAD: So no money involved.
MOLLY: Well ...
SOREN: Kinda. Which brings us back to Gil.
GIL GAUL: You know, I want to know a little bit more about how this works. And so what happened was ...
SOREN: 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.
GIL GAUL: I would call one a day, or call two a day, and ask them what do you charge for a unit of blood?
JAD: What do you charge?
GIL GAUL: Yeah.
MOLLY: Yeah. This was one of the surprises. It turns out right after they draw the blood ...
WOMAN: It feels kind of—the tube feels warm.
NURSE: Mm-hmm. Because it's coming right out of your body. [laughs]
MOLLY: ... right after, they'll put it in a bag.
NURSE: Keep it on ice. Package it up.
MOLLY: And they will sell that pint of blood to a local hospital.
NURSE: Yep. So we do have different contracts with different hospitals, different blood centers.
SOREN: I believe right now, it's like almost $300 a pint is what they sell it for.
MOLLY: What?
SOREN: That's ...
JAD: 300 bucks a pint!
MOLLY: That's—I was thinking five.
SOREN: Dollars?
MOLLY: Yeah.
SOREN: No. We should say $300 is actually kind of like a rough average for most major cities.
MOLLY: Right. And theoretically, the price that the hospitals pay the blood center, it's just to cover costs. And there are a lot.
GIL GAUL: The salaries, the bags, the testing, the distribution, business office, public relations.
SOREN: That's just a partial list that one former blood banker gave us, but that's really what Gil wanted to understand: 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?
GIL GAUL: And some of the places were shocked by the questions. Some of them would say "There's no way on Earth we're gonna tell you." Some of them would say, "Oh, we charge $48 a unit."
SOREN: So he made a list ...
GIL GAUL: On a legal, yellow pad.
SOREN: ... of all the different prices the blood banks would charge their local hospitals.
GIL GAUL: You might see, at that time, as low as the low 30s and as high as 70 bucks.
SOREN: And he wondered, you know, why the variation?
GIL GAUL: Some of it was explainable. Labor costs are higher in Los Angeles, New York. So that made sense, but where that got interesting was ...
SOREN: He says he just happened to be talking to some blood banker, probably a guy from the Midwest.
GIL GAUL: Maybe about prices.
SOREN: And the guy just casually mentions that his blood bank actually gets way more blood than it needs.
GIL GAUL: Yeah.
SOREN: They had a surplus. And they told him ...
GIL GAUL: What we do is we take that blood ...
SOREN: And we sell it to other blood banks.
GIL GAUL: We sell it to somebody who can't collect enough. And I probably reacted like, "What?" [laughs]
SOREN: And that led him to call up a blood bank in a little town called Appleton, Wisconsin.
GIL GAUL: In Appleton, they ...
SOREN: That blood bank, at the time, was pulling in plenty of blood, way more than they needed.
GIL GAUL: Oh yeah.
SOREN: Locally.
GIL GAUL: I knew that Appleton had no trouble collecting plenty of blood.
SOREN: And yet ...
GIL GAUL: Around the holidays ...
SOREN: The director himself was quoted in the local paper saying, like ...
GIL GAUL: "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."
SOREN: And Gil basically asked the guy, "Why are you saying this? You're doing fine."
GIL GAUL: I did what any reporter would do. I began to press him on some numbers. He acknowledged that half of the blood they were collecting in Appleton was actually being sold to other blood centers.
SOREN: Appleton was taking a chunk of that blood, marking it up $10 a pint, and selling it to ...
GIL GAUL: To—I think it was Lexington, Kentucky. I called Lexington, Kentucky.
SOREN: They were taking that blood and taking out the platelets, and then selling the red blood cells ...
GIL GAUL: To Broward.
SOREN: Broward County, Florida.
GIL GAUL: So I then called Broward.
SOREN: And he found out that Broward was marking it up $20 more a pint and selling it ...
GIL GAUL: To New York City, which is always looking for blood. They could never collect nearly enough blood.
SOREN: Basically, what he discovered was that the whole gift economy of blood, that was only on the bottom level.
NURSE: I'm just feeling the direction at the vein right now. It's nice and plump.
SOREN: It was only down there.
NURSE: You have an absolutely gorgeous vein in here. Absolutely gorgeous.
WOMAN: I do?
NURSE: You do.
SOREN: As soon as you moved up a rung ...
GIL GAUL: It was a market.
SOREN: ... blood was being bought and sold and marked up.
GIL GAUL: At every step of the way.
JAD: And this was—so we're talking late '80s here. This is ...
SOREN: Yeah. Late '80s. '88, '89.
JAD: And is this still going on?
GIL GAUL: Oh yeah.
SOREN: And it's huge, huge business.
GIL GAUL: 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.
MOLLY: And it's not just the Red Cross. I mean, the Red Cross does 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.
CHARLES ROUAULT: When I left the blood center, we were at the time about a $90-million-a-year blood center.
SOREN: So this is Charles Rouault.
CHARLES ROUAULT: I have been in blood banking actually since about 1973.
SOREN: And more than any other guy we talked to, he really gave us a feeling for the business side of the blood business, especially ...
CHARLES ROUAULT: In South Florida.
SOREN: In South Florida in the '80s and '90s, you had kind of an unusual situation, because you had a bunch of different blood banks.
CHARLES ROUAULT: There was a program in Miami-Dade. There was one in West Palm Beach.
SOREN: All these different programs competing for the same donors.
GIL GAUL: You might anticipate there would be some competition, but you didn't think that you could ever see anything like South Florida.
CHARLES ROUAULT: Things—things became quite heated.
SOREN: The heads of the blood banks attacked each other in the press.
GIL GAUL: In the press, in the local stories. Yeah.
MOLLY: They got into crazy bidding wars over access to high school students.
CHARLES ROUAULT: The great school board war. Yes.
SOREN: They accused each other of ...
GIL GAUL: Stealing donors, underpricing their products in order to gain market share.
PETER TOMASULO: One morning, I would go to work ...
SOREN: That's Peter Tomasulo. He was one of Casey Rouault's competitors.
PETER TOMASULO: ... 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 gonna switch to Casey. That feels horrible.
CHARLES ROUAULT: Well, it's business.
MOLLY: At a certain point, the competition, says Casey, got so intense ...
CHARLES ROUAULT: That I got a number of ugly phone calls from people.
JAD: Saying what?
CHARLES ROUAULT: We're going to bury you.
JAD: We're going to bury you?
CHARLES ROUAULT: Mm-hmm.
SOREN: In that case, the call came from a New York blood bank. Casey 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.
CHARLES ROUAULT: So we were undercutting the blood supplier in New York at that time.
JAD: And they didn't like that.
CHARLES ROUAULT: No, but ...
SOREN: It worked.
CHARLES ROUAULT: We became known sort of as the golden arch to New York.
SOREN: He eventually figured out that he could buy blood on the cheap from a place like, say, I don't know, Iowa, and sell it up the chain to New York.
JAD: So you really did become kind of a ...
MOLLY: A blood runner.
CHARLES ROUAULT: Well, we called it arbitrage.
JAD: Arbitrage. Yeah. It's exactly arbitrage, isn't it?
CHARLES ROUAULT: We were arbitraging the units.
JAD: I mean, that's—on Wall Street, that's the most cut-throat of the cut-throat are arbitragers.
CHARLES ROUAULT: [laughs] Yeah, but we're talking here about blood. And do you throw it away or do you find a home for it?
SOREN: Casey says if he hadn't done that, he would have had to pour that blood down the drain.
CHARLES ROUAULT: 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.
JAD: Even the guy on the other end of the phone call, who said "I will bury you?" You think he had the same motivations as you?
CHARLES ROUAULT: Yeah. Actually, it was a she.
JAD: Oh. Really?
SOREN: And here's the thing. Like, at a certain point—I mean, Molly, I think you'll agree, that we started to feel differently about this whole blood business, blood system kind of stuff.
JAD: Molly, do you agree with that?
MOLLY: I do agree.
SOREN: I mean, we've talked to—how many blood bank people have we talked to?
MOLLY: Oh God.
SOREN: Tons.
MOLLY: Yeah.
SOREN: I have to say, like, these guys are not—you know, they're not that cut-throat Wall Street person. Like, talking to them, they're not like that. I mean, they're stuck with the reality that demands that they act in business-like ways.
JAD: But not to be intentionally naïve 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.
SOREN: Well, I mean maybe you need to let go of that idea.
MOLLY: 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.
SOREN: You know, maybe we need to let a little bit of that gift image go.
DOUGLAS STARR: 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 an old-fashioned idea that no longer is valid.
MOLLY: And it may actually be harmful, according to Douglas Starr. Take 9/11.
DOUGLAS STARR: 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 were 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 gonna be able to use that blood.'"
JAD: Wow.
DOUGLAS STARR: They had huge lines, all the facilities got overwhelmed all over the country.
MOLLY: A lot of the facilities ended up having to pour a lot of blood down the drain.
DOUGLAS STARR: Blood went bad, but there was this other rebound effect. And that is if you've stood online to give blood, and they 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.
MOLLY: Oh, because they were like, "Oh, we gave blood. They were full."
DOUGLAS STARR: Yeah. "I did my civic responsibility." So the final stage is we really do have to understand that this is a pharmaceutical.
SOREN: 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—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.
GIL GAUL: I wish they were a little more transparent.
SOREN: Definitely. But I'm the only one who has this stuff. And when I stop to think about how powerful this drug, this pharmaceutical really was, I kind of decided maybe I should give.
SOREN: That is a big one. That is a really big one.
NURSE: 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 gonna feel a pinch, okay? Don't move your hand. Take a deep breath. Open your hand.
SOREN: Thank you for being my first nurse.
NURSE: You're welcome.
SOREN: Donor nurse.
NURSE: All righty.
JAD: Producers Soren Wheeler and Molly Webster. Special thanks to Rachel Quimby and Anna Weggel. And also, Edward Scott and Jeff Mikula. And before we go, we actually had the Brooklyn band Lucius play a couple of blood songs that we used in this episode. You might have heard one earlier. Here it is.
[music]

JAD: 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.
[SCOTT CARNEY: Hi, this is Scott Carney.]
[DAN TRACY: This is Dan Tracy.]
[SCOTT CARNEY: And I'm calling to leave a message about you guys for you guys on the radio.]
[DAN TRACY: So here you go.]
[SCOTT CARNEY: Radiolab is produced by Jad Abumrad.]
[DAN TRACY: Our staff includes Ellen Horne, Soren Wheeler, Pat Walters.]
[GIL GAUL: Tim Howard, Brenna Farrell, Molly Webster.]
[SCOTT CARNEY: Malissa O'Donnell, Dylan Keefe.]
[DAN TRACY: Lynn Levy and Andy Mills.]
[SCOTT CARNEY: With help from Matt Kielty, Kelsey Padgett, Derek Clements and Sruthi Pinnamaneni.]

[DAN TRACY: Special thanks to Anita Burgess, Amy Wagers, Francesco Loffredo.]
[SCOTT CARNEY: Stephen Anderson and Barbara Johanson.]
[DAN TRACY: And Joe. Stake through the heart. Love it. Goodbye, Radiolab. Goodbye.]

 

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