Clotting is only one of the primary risks in delay. However, even if gross clotting in whole blood is avoided, the chemical interactions leading up to it have begun so that it is impossible to bank human blood in the state in which it circulates in the body.
Cohn runs the Lab with octopus-like efficiency and inspires his helpers to work long hours by his own almost tireless example. He seems to exert direct control over almost all of the lab, including the design of pamphlet covers. Believing that scientific information should be released to scientists first, he refuses to give press interviews or allow members of his staff to be quoted on scientific matters.
The Wandering Botanists
Most of his helpers have great admiration for him, though some complain that he overorganizes. He does most of this work in luncheon-conferences (to save time)--which range from two and three day gatherings to his "round tables" of his Formed Elements Group. At the latter, experts in fields related to blood separation and preservation gather once or twice a month to munch sandwiches and discuss recent progress. These are tape-recorded for future reference.
The University Laboratory itself is housed in the Harvard Medical School, while its Blood Preservation Laboratory, site of development work arising from fundamental research--and where donors blood--in the Bussey Institution of Applied Biology in Jamaica Plain.
Formerly--about 1896--an applied science school for "estate managers," the latter also contains the State Wasserman Laboratory, the State Diagnostic Laboratory, and certain activities of the Botany Department. The botanists emerge in force in the summer, but they have been squessed for the most part into the greenhouse and the basement.
Cohn's Lab boasts the impressive title, "University Laboratory of Physical Chemistry Related to Medicine and public Health, Harvard University." Formerly secretaries were required to answer the phone and repeat the complete title. A new era has come, however, and if you should call Jamaica 4-0456 to offer your blood, the answering voice will say: "Blood Preservation Laboratory.