436 ANNUAL REPORT SMITHSONIAN INSTITUTION, 19 45 



Preservation of the concentrated antibody globulins of the blood 

 as a public health record of the course of epidemics.— Although the 

 concentrated antibodies separated from the pooled plasma of a popula- 

 tion will not have value in the prophylaxis or treatment of many 

 diseases, they characterize the state of immunity of that population as 

 a permanent public health record. 



The chemical, clinical, and immunological investigations on blood 

 and its derivatives which have been carried forward during this war 

 have resulted in contributions to clinical medicine and surgery, to im- 

 munology and epidemiology, to protein chemistry, and to the methodics 

 of the production and control of biological products. They are open- 

 ing new vistas in our understanding of natural products and natural 

 systems. 



ACKNOWLEDGMENTS 



This work was originally supported by grants from the Rockefeller 

 Foundation and from funds of Harvard University. It was aided 

 early in 1941 by grants from the Committee on Medicine of the Na- 

 tional Research Council, which included a grant from the American 

 College of Physicians. Since August 1941, it has been carried out 

 under contract, recommended by the Committee on Medical Research, 

 between the Office of Scientific Research and Development and Har- 

 vard University. The insight of my many fellow members in this 

 department has been immeasurably aided by many colleagues — chemi- 

 cal, clinical, immunological, and pathological — members of this or 

 other universities, of the Armed Forces, of committees of the National 

 Research Council, of the American Red Cross, and of commercial 

 laboratories with Navy contracts for plasma fractionation, who 

 labored with us. Indeed, it would be impossible to list here the very 

 large number of individuals and agencies who have collaborated in 

 this work. 



REFERENCES 

 A. Blood. 



Our present knowledge of the respiratory function of the blood is based so 

 largely on the work of the Schools of Physiology in Cambridge, England (0*. 

 Barcroft, The respiratory function of the blood, Cambridge Univ. Press, Cam- 

 bridge, 1914), and in Cambridge, Mass. (L. J. Henderson, Blood, a study in 

 general physiology, Yale Univ. Press, New Haven, 1928) that reference is 

 made to these volumes for the earlier literature. Our knowledge of carbonic 

 anhydrase also comes from the Cambridge School (F. J. W. Roughton, Phys. 

 Rev., vol. 15, p. 241, 1935), and from the Connaught Laboratories where it has 

 been recently crystallized by Scott (D. A. Scott and A. M. Fisher, Journ. Biol. 

 Chem. vol. 144, p. 371, 1942). "The mammalian red cell and the properties 

 of haemolytic systems" are discussed by E. Ponder (Gebruder Borntraeger, 

 Berlin, 1934 ; and more recently in Cold Spring Harbor Symposium on Quantitative 

 Biology, vol. 8, 1940), and in a review by Higgins (Ann. Rev. Physiol., vol. 3, 

 p. 283, 1941). A great deal of new knowledge has been gained in this war 

 but has not yet been made available. 



