The Story of the African-American Inventor Charles Drew

Charles Richard Drew was born on June 3, 1904, in Washington, D.C. His father, Richard, was a carpet layer, and his mother, Nora, was a school teacher. Drew was the eldest of the couple's five children.

Drew strived to earn good grades while he attended elementary, as well as high school. Athletics, however, came naturally to Drew, and he easily won four medals in the field of swimming by the time he was eight years old.

During his junior and senior years at Paul Laurence Dunbar High School, Drew received the James E. Walker Memorial Medal for his excellent athletic skills. Drew was a valued member of the football, basketball, baseball, and track team.

After high school, Drew attended Amherst College. He was honored with the Howard Hill Mossman Trophy for his athletic performances durng his four years at Amherst.

The young African-American man lacked the funds he needed to enter medical school, so he
worked and saved his money. Finally, in 1928, he went on to attend medical school at McGill University in Montreal, Canada. Naturally, he performed well in sports at McGill too.

All of Drew's hard work to date paid off when he received a fellowship for specialized training at Howard University's Medical School. This allowed him to study at Columbia University Medical School. Charles Drew's interest was blood. Specifically, "blood transfusions." He wanted to learn all he could about the subject. 

He studied "blood banking" which is the process of collecting and storing blood for transfusions. Through his experiments, Drew found out that blood plasma could be succesfully used instead of whole blood. Plasma had a longer "shelf life" than whole blood. The following year, in 1940, Drew wrote the results of his experiments up in a published report.

Through his discovery that blood could be separated, and the plasma could be kept until it was needed for a blood transfusion, Drew, in essence created "blood banks".