Congressman Sylvester Turner (Dem. – Houston).
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Edited to add: The NYT did not have a story up when I posted, but they do now. I don’t see any coverage in the WP.
Edited to add 2: WP coverage, but it really doesn’t add anything.
James Harrison, big damn hero.
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Mr. Harrison’s plasma contained the rare antibody anti-D. Scientists used it to make a medication for pregnant mothers whose immune systems could attack their fetuses’ red blood cells, according to Australian Red Cross Lifeblood.
Anti-D helps protect against problems that can occur when babies and mothers have different blood types, most often if the fetus is “positive” and the mother is “negative,” according to the Cleveland Clinic. (The positive and negative signs are called the Rhesus factor, or Rh factor.)
In such cases, a mother’s immune system might react to the fetus as if it were a foreign threat. That can lead babies to develop a dangerous and potentially fatal condition, hemolytic disease of the fetus and newborn, which can cause anemia and jaundice.
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In Australia, scientists from the Walter and Eliza Hall Institute of Medical Research in Melbourne are working to create a synthetic version of the drug using what some have called “James in a Jar,” an antibody that can be made in a lab.
But for now, human donors are essential: The anti-D shots are made with donated plasma, and Mr. Harrison was one of about 200 donors among the 27 million people in Australia, Lifeblood said.
“It wasn’t one big heroic act,” Jemma Falkenmire, a spokeswoman for Lifeblood, said in an interview as she reflected on Mr. Harrison’s 64 years of donations, from 1954 to 2018. “It was just a lifetime of being there and doing these small acts of good bit by bit.”
Selwyn Raab, journalist and author. He did a lot of reporting on the Mafia, and on people who were wrongfully convicted of crimes.
One was George Whitmore Jr., who had been imprisoned for the 1963 murders of Janice Wylie and Emily Hoffert, roommates in an Upper East Side apartment — “career girls,” as the tabloids called them.
Mr. Raab, working first for the merged newspaper The New York World-Telegram and The Sun and then for NBC News and the New York public television station WNET-TV, uncovered evidence showing that Mr. Whitmore was elsewhere on the day of those murders and had no part in an unrelated attempted rape with which he was also charged.
Mr. Whitmore said that the police had beaten him, and that he had no lawyer during the interrogation. In 1996, his case was cited by the United States Supreme Court in Miranda v. Arizona, the landmark ruling that upheld a suspect’s right to counsel.
Mr. Raab wrote a book about the case, “Justice in the Back Room,” which became the basis for “Kojak,” the CBS series about a police detective, played by Telly Savalas, which ran for five years in the 1970s. “I’m not a detective,” Mr. Raab said. “I just look for the most reasonable approach to a story.”
He joined The Times in 1974 and worked there for 26 years. Reporting for the paper, he uncovered evidence that helped free Rubin (Hurricane) Carter, the middleweight boxer who was imprisoned for 19 years in the 1966 shooting deaths of three people in a bar in Paterson, N.J.
The Carter case was another instance of police coercion and prosecutorial overreach, one that also led to the conviction of another man, John Artis. Mr. Carter, who died in 2014, became something of a folk hero, his cause championed in a 1976 Bob Dylan song, “Hurricane,” and in a 1999 film, “The Hurricane,” in which Mr. Carter was played by Denzel Washington.
