Now I Know (5 page)

European history has its fair share of dictators, but since the fall of the Iron Curtain, almost all of the continent’s nations have established more freedom-friendly governments. The lone exception is Alexander Lukashenko, the President of Belarus, who once described himself to Reuters (correctly) as “the last and only dictator in Europe.” And since 1994, Lukashenko has ruled Belarus by force or guile, as one would expect any dictator to do. When he won re-election in 2010—under questionable voting conditions, to say the least—thousands took to the streets of Minsk in protest. More than 700 people were arrested (including a half-dozen people who, just a few days earlier, were presidential candidates), and a few people were charged with crimes carrying fifteen-year prison sentences. Lukashenko’s message was clear: Dissent won’t be tolerated.

Although most protesters have stayed away, a handful—several hundreds—found a way to passively protest without placards, chants, or any words whatsoever. As the
Economist
reported in July 2011, every Wednesday the group started appearing in the streets, wherever they were in Belarus, and began clapping. The clapping protests, organized via social networks, caught the attention of the rank and file Belarusian and, of course, of Lukashenko. His response? He hired enforcers to drive around in vans and arrest people, quite literally, for clapping in the streets.

Over the course of a few weeks, according to the
Christian Science Monitor
, more than 1,700 people were arrested. One of the people nabbed was a man named Konstantin Kaplin. He, like the others, was convicted of the crime of applauding in public. Many of his fellow convicts received very strict sentences—fifteen days in prison and “hefty fines,” per the
CSM
.

Kaplin asserted that he was innocent. He claimed that he wasn’t protesting, but watching, taking pictures of the actual protesters on his cell phone camera. Rather, he argued, this was a case of being in the wrong place at the wrong time. Others certainly made similar arguments, but Kaplin could produce incontrovertible evidence that he wasn’t there clapping up a storm.

His proof? He has only one arm.

Unfortunately, the Belarusian police, being subordinate to a dictator with a history of dealing unkindly with insubordination, testified otherwise. Kaplin, despite missing an arm and the requisite attached hand needed to clap, was, they said, still clapping. The Belarusian judge, in the same situation as the police officers, convicted the one-armed “clapper.”

The sentence, fortunately, was softer than the typical one, with no time served and only a fine of $200. But for Kaplin, it was still significant. Because he was a pensioner, the fine was equal to twice his monthly grant from the state.

In the mid-1940s, an Australian teenager named James Harrison lost a lung to metastasized pneumonia. The procedure to remove the lung required major blood transfusions, thirteen liters in total. Harrison spent three months in the hospital recovering, and even at that young age, he understood that the extraordinary number of transfusions was fundamental in saving his life. He vowed that, as an adult, he would repay the favor and become a blood donor himself.

Through 2012, Harrison has fulfilled that promise—a thousand times over.

In 1954, soon after he began fulfilling his promise, researchers noticed something unusual about his blood. It contained a rare antibody, one that could unlock a cure for a disease that affects fetuses. The illness is called Rhesus disease, named after a protein also found in the blood of Rhesus monkeys. The protein, in and of itself, is typically not an issue for day-to-day lives; a person can be “Rh+” (that is, has the protein) or “Rh-” and, generally, not know or care.

But when a woman becomes pregnant, the presence of the Rhesus protein comes into play. If the mother is Rh- and the fetus inherits Rh+ blood from the father, the mother’s immune system may end up attacking the fetus’s bloodstream, seeing it as a threat. This can result in a wide range of medical complications for the fetus, ranging from being mildly anemic at birth to being stillborn.

Before discovering Harrison, doctors believed that the right type of antibody could be used to create a vaccine against Rhesus disease. Harrison had that antibody. Researchers asked him to undergo a series of tests to see if his blood could provide the cure and, after he obtained a $1 million life insurance policy to protect his wife in case anything went wrong, Harrison agreed.

Harrison’s blood provided the key to beating the disease. His blood plasma contained an extremely rare antibody, which was used to develop something called the Anti-D vaccine. This suppresses the Rh- mother’s immune system from attacking Rh+blood.

Since discovering that his bloodstream contains a life-saving ingredient, Harrison has been on a mission to make the most of it. He has donated plasma, on average, about eighteen times a year—roughly once every three weeks—since 1954. In May 2011, he made his 1,000th donation, easily a record. Each donation takes about forty minutes—that’s just under a month of his life dedicated to giving blood.

From the world’s perspective, that’s certainly a great deal. To date, hundreds of thousands of women—including his own daughter—have received the vaccine made from Harrison’s blood. In total, Harrison’s antibody has been used to treat more than 2 million babies who would otherwise have Rhesus disease. And millions more in the future will be saved by the antibody that he and others naturally produce.

People typically come with two healthy kidneys. We only need one in order to survive, and therefore the second one can be donated without much risk to the donor. In general, the procedure to donate a kidney is no more dangerous than any other surgery, although—being a surgical procedure—it is not without risk. Typically, kidneys fail in tandem (although in rare cases, most often caused by blunt trauma or cancer, only one will). Therefore, leaving yourself with only one kidney isn’t as risky as many would believe—if it fails, most likely, the other would have as well.

Due to moral and practical concerns (which are subjects for other publications), selling one’s kidney is illegal in most of the world. In the United States, for example, in 2011,
CBS News
reported that a New Jersey man was sentenced to two and a half years in prison for brokering kidney sales. Given the political and legal restraints upon transactions regarding kidneys and other organs, people have come up with many creative solutions. For example, a recent pair of Nobel laureates in Economics earned the award for their work in “matching theory”—which, as
The
New York Times
noted, can be used to link up kidney donors and donees who otherwise do not know each other.

And where there is room for a Nobel Prize, there’s probably room for its polar opposite: reality TV. As
Mental Floss
notes, a Dutch television producer came up with a shocking concept: a show in which three patients, each in need of a kidney, present their cases to the audience. Waiting in the wings is a terminally ill patient with a kidney, ready for donation upon her death, to be given to whomever the viewers at home deem the most worthy. The 2007 show, called
De Grote Donorshow
, was, to say the least, controversial. There were attempts to censor it. The Dutch Kidney Foundation asked the show to remove their logo from it, and many officials decried the show as reflecting poorly on the Netherlands.

But the outrage was, it turns out, unwarranted.
De Grote Donorshow
was a sham. It was designed to raise awareness of the lack of available kidneys in the Netherlands and the country’s low rate of organ donor registration. The terminally ill patient was a model/actress; no kidney would be donated. The three patients in renal failure did, in fact, need kidneys, but they were in on the ruse. The deception worked. Per the Dutch news portal NU.nl, just days after the finale aired, more than 40,000 donor forms were downloaded off the national donor registry’s website, and within a month or so, over 7,000 new donors registered.

Starting in the late 1980s, a man six feet three inches tall, weighing 163 pounds, with blond hair and blue eyes, himself born in Wilmington, Delaware, started donating sperm. In doing so, he helped create at least a dozen children. As these children’s mothers are scattered all over the country, the children are as well. And in most cases, these biological half-siblings have never met each other.

But some of the children of this man—Donor 150 of the California Cryobank—have connected. On Sunday, November 20, 2005,
The
New York Times
ran a story titled, “Hello, I’m Your Sister. Our Father is Donor 150.” It recounted how two of the girls—Danielle Pagano, then a sixteen-year-old from Long Island, New York, and JoEllen Marsh, then a fifteen-year-old from northwestern Pennsylvania—connected. Connecting with their father, though, seemed like a stretch. As the
Times
noted, “Like most anonymous sperm donors, Donor 150 of the California Cryobank will probably never meet any of the offspring he fathered through sperm bank donations.” The donees never knew his true identity, making it intentionally impossible for them or their progeny to contact the donor-dad.

But finding a half-sibling is a different story. Many donee-parents sign up to work with an organization called the Donor Sibling Registry, which operates a database of children associated with their donors’ information. That information is scant, but it has enough to connect half-siblings—all you need to know is what sperm bank the sperm came from and the donor’s anonymous identification number, which the donee-moms have. From its founding in 2000 through 2012, the Donor Sibling Registry has successfully connected nearly 10,000 half-siblings born from donors.

In the case noted above, soon after these two found each other, other half-siblings followed suit. A group of them planned have a family “reunion” (a misnomer, as they’d never met) that Thanksgiving. Due to the coverage from the article, this scattered pseudo-family grew, as other half-siblings connected as well.

Another person who came across the article? Jeffrey Harrison, a vagabond of sorts, who, per the
Times
, had a checkered history. The
Times
called him “a gentle and kindhearted man” who “liked yoga and animals, lived in an R.V., [had] posed for
Playgirl
during his sperm-donor days, was an unabashed believer in a host of conspiracy theories and supported himself and his small menagerie with odd jobs.” He happened across that day’s paper in the discard pile at a cafe he frequented in Venice, California. Finding the paper in the cafe was a stroke of luck—the
Sunday Times
, especially in parts of the country other than New York, doesn’t last very long, and typically, when it was deposited in the used bin at the cafe, it lacked the front section.

But Jeffrey Harrison was not one of Pagano or Marsh’s siblings. He, better known as Donor 150, was their biological father.

To date, Harrison has a mixed relationship with his offspring, whom he often stops by to visit as he travels around in his RV. Some treat him as a “fun uncle,” in his words, who makes seemingly random appearances in their lives. Marsh sees him as someone who wants to be “more than just a donor.” Others don’t envision a permanent role in their lives for Harrison. But most are appreciative of the fact that their previously unknown genetic history is no longer a specter.

Approximately 1–2 percent of the world’s population has red hair, with the majority of such people coming from European descent. Roughly 12 percent of Scots and 10 percent of Irish people are believed to have red hair, well above the populations of other countries. Being a redhead typically goes along with a fair complexion and freckles. But it may come with something else as well—a resistance to anesthesia.