Who developed the first blood bank and a system for storing blood plasma?
A blood bank is a cache or bank of blood or blood components, gathered as a result of blood donation, stored and preserved for later use in blood transfusions. An early development leading to the establishment of blood banks occurred in 1915, when Richard Lewison of Mount Sinai Hospital, New York initiated the use of sodium citrate as an anticoagulant. This discovery transformed the blood transfusion procedure from direct (vein-to-vein) to indirect. In the same year, Richard Weil demonstrated the feasibility of refrigerated storage of anticoagulated blood. The introduction of a citrate-glucose solution by Francis Peyton Rous and JR Turner two years later permitted storage of blood in containers for several days, thus opening the way for the first “blood depot” established in Britain during World War I. Oswald Hope Robertson, a medical researcher and U.S. Army officer who established the depots, is now recognized as the creator of the first blood bank. An important breakthrough came in
