IN a pleasant room in a Red | ‘Cross Blood Donor’s Clinic, soretty volunteer nurse calls Piext, please,’ and a Ca- dian war worker—who is shine he had a sood thick ak with onions, since he ® had to get along on dry toast Wi fruit salad for the past eight ‘firs to get his blood in order— jaows the nurse. into a little ficle where his temperature is (Ged down. A few minutes air he is lying in a Jarger room, @e2re the pretty nurse “freezes” [ arm, a white-smocked doctor ‘ets a needle in the vein, and e-hin stream of blood pcurs ) a pint bottle at his side .. . ($t almost the same time, in a fad hospital in Italy, an Allied ly, doctor wearily loosens his after a hard nights work, and down to write a letter home. - .. - Phe miracles that can #accomplished with blood plas- 4 are almost unbelievable,’ he tes. “Today I have seen men yught back to life, | have seen for return to pallid cheeks, | fe seen the pulsebeat return #normal. And J knew that if time- had been: eight years ier, the men now sléeping Fi cefully in the next room welld be dead .... ” Is miracle—the use of blood )@ ima in the treatment of sheck, ich is one of the major causes ~gieath in war—is the result of a7 Work of such scientists as Dr. Biman Bethune, the Canadian ianitarian who was one of the i to enter the war against ism. The earlier experiments if Bethune and his colleagues oto the organization of the [fi adian Blood Transfusion nit djch helped“to save the lives ¥ housands of Spanish Republi- "§ soldiers. Later, Bethune went China. There, amid primitive heartbreaking conditions, he ‘Giinued his work until his i sh. And it is the discoveries s His great anti-fascist which used today on every world lefront whenever the princi- i of human blood transfusion i employed. epee a 2 "URING 1944, 50,000 pints of Ao must pass through the #couver Red _ Cross or’s Clinic, if urgent needs ot & armed forces are to be met. “| thousands of pints of that gc, local labor men are de- ined, will be the good, red ad of Vancouver trade union- aq Was this- Idjcers in this city that the 'td which will save the lives of itless Allied fighters in the ang all-out offensive against 4Sm would not be lacking that easeveral leading trade union- }jand members of the Labor- Ufressive Party to suggest to sialS of the clinic here the Alas of an all-union conference S#iy conerete plans for a huge paign for blood donors, to be fy on Friday, February 18, at f-ouver Hotel. Naturally, the 4 Cross officials greeted the 4 enthusiastically. 4 uring the past year we have aed up 16,000 donors here,” qaxed Executive Secretary E. 7 Kenny. “This vear we must Blood - determination of | increase that number to 50,000. The workers in our war indus- tries are making a tremendous conrtibution to our war effort by the production of the weapons of War, and the volunteer workers of this Clinic are ready to co- operate fully with them in this Campaign. We can accommodate 250. donors each~ evening. And each night's donations will pro- vide transfusions capable of sav- ing the lives of 50 men in uni- form.” DR. BETHUNE One day this week I went down to the blood donors’ clinic with a group of aeronautical workers — some of whom were three and four-time shipyard and - Labor's Blood For Victory By CYNTHIA CARTER donors—to get a clear picture of just what happens to a blood donor. I followed through the “whole process with Aeronautical Lodge secretary Stu Kennely, who was giving his second dona- tien. : After his blood was typed (and Boeing workers will be glad to know that Stu’s homogioben stacks up with just about the reddest on the chart) he was ushered into a sitting room to wait his turn. Across from wus sat a North Shore boilermaker, at the clinic for the third time. “Nothing to it,” he assured me in answer to my question. “As a matter of fact | usually feel better afterwards than | did be- fore.” = Next Stu was “Bleeding led Room”, where into the he stretehed out on one of the twenty spotless couches. In a few minutes the pint bottle stropped to the side of the bed was Slowly filling. “How do you feel?” anxiously. “Same as usual,” he answered. Apparently the other “pa- tients” felt the same. All seemed to be resting comfortakly. The shipyard worker, stretched out en the next bed, was carrying on a steady conversation with his wurse. Ten minutes later, Stu was put- ting on his coat. “Is that all there is to it?” I asked incredulously. — “Thats enough,’ smiled the nurse, patting the sealed bottle, which she kept out of his sight. Apparently no patient is allowed to look at his own blood. I asked The Origin By J.B. S. HALDANE, FRS A\Y ew started naming different kinds of animals and plants long before history began. This is shown by the fact that some animals have similar names in languages such as Eng- lish and Hindustani, whose common ancestral language must have been spoken many thousand of years ago. Primitive peoples whom we call Savage—though that is probably nothing to what they call us— often have names for hundreds of kinds of wild animals. These names are obviously use- ful. Clearly the differences be- tween two sparrows are less than those between any sparrow and a_chaffinch. In the middle ages the philosophers whose teaching Was accepted by the Catholic Church, thought that the names stood for forms common to all members of a “species,” and hav- ing. a real existence of their own. Linnacus, the Swede who found- ed modern system of classify- ing animals and plants, thought each species had been created separately. Lamarck, largely from a study of fossil animals, thought that they had been formed from other species in the past, but his theory of how this had happened was incorrect. Darwin produced much stronger evidence for the origin of species, and his theory of how they originated is much nearer the truth. ‘ But it was not the whole truth. He pointed out that by selection men had produced races of dogs, pigeons and other animals and plants which would certainly be put in different species if they were found wild. But his eritics answered that they can still breed together. Even a New- foundland dog and a dachshund have given fertile hybrids, where- as a dog and a fox do not pro- duce hybrids at all, even if arti- fiicially mated, and hybrids be- tween a horse and a donkey are sterile. It is true that some animals and plants of obviously different spe- cies will give moderately fertile hybrids, for example, the large and small elephant hawk moths, and the* European and Chilean strawberries, whose crossing gave our cultivated varieties. But other species which resemble one an- other closely will not do so. There may be blood from a Vancouver donor in this plasma being administered to a wound-shocked soldier somewhere on the Italian front. The bottle. was packed with others to be taken to the Van- eouver laboratory. There it will be processed, put through a centrifugal machine which di- vides red cells (which are use- Jess) from the precious serum, the serum will be forced from metal containers through filters into sterile bottles, and the bottles will be chemically frozen. The frozen serum will be dried ét a low temperature to prevent chemical change. Then the bottles ‘of dried serum will be placed in cans, hermetically sealed, and will Keep indefinitely. To pre- pare. the serum for use will. re- quire only the addition of dGdis- tilled water. Ay THE coming trade union conference delegates will be abie to watch the whole process them- selves, for the Clinic has arrang- ed to tranSport to the hotel a complete unit, and a local trade The work of the last 30 years has completely removed this ob- jection to: Darwin’s theory, though it has shown that it has to be modified in another respect. Clearly the conclusive experi- ment is to start with a group -of plants or animals which belong to the same species and breed to- gether, and from~-this to make another group which can breed with itself, and not with the other descendants of the original group. This was first done for a plant, in London, by Crane and Jorgen- sen, working with the tomato, and for an animal by Koshenni- kov in Moscow, witha small fly ealled Drosophila. If you repeat- edly cut a tomato shoot back, some of the new shoots will have thicker leaves and other differ_ ences. If these are cut off and planted they will set seed with thei rown pollen, giving more but smaller fruits than the orig- inal. : Another way in which new plant species arise is by a doub- ling of the chromosomes in what started as a sterile hybrid. Thus species can arise at one single leap. Perhaps Darwin's political and philosophical outlook, which newts, unionist — who is a five-time donor and whose name is yet held secret—will before their eyes donate his sixth pint of blood. Present will be Red Cross nurses and doctors, as well as members of the armed forees, who will speak briefly on the actual needs of the battlefield. “With the signing at Teheran of the agreement to invade Eur- ope on all fronts,” points out the call to the conference, “the need for_ blood_ serum_— and_ conse- quently demands upon the Van- couver clinic—wil! be tremend- ously increased in order to pre- pare for the coming all-out of- fensive against fascism.” Delegates ‘are asked to come to the conference prepared to discuss conerete plans to inerease the number of donations which ean be put into immediate ef- fect. The call to such a confer- enee is a direct call for action. And Vancouver labor unionists will not be slow to answer! Of Species was that of the 19th Century Brit- ish upper-middle class, gave him a bias in favor of slow change. Still, the differences which pre- vent crossing in most animal spe- cies have almost certainly arisen, slowly, and we find all kinds of intermediates. For example, when many species are crossed, the hy- brids of one sex only are fertile. Indeed, the rule which generally enables one to predict which sex will be sterile, if only one is so, _ is called Haldane’s rule, as I dis- covered it. Some wild species seem to be in process of splitting up. It is not enough to form new varieties. If these mate freely, as the dif- ferent color varieties of our mice, snails and grasshoppers do, the species will merely re- main variable. - But if different varieties have different habitats or breeding seasons, or show a repugnance to crossing, a species may break up. For example, the peppered moth and the mottled beauty have de- veloped black races outside. Thus we see that Darwin was largely correct in his views as to how new species arose, but that like many other thinkers of the 19th century, he over-estimated the “inevitability of gradualness.”