140 
The magnitude of the loss so stuns me that I try not to think of it. 
Had we simply had the Revco fail, I would have been horrified, but the 
freezer would have given us a good chance of saving much by a quick transfer. 
I had idiotically never comtemplated that we would have a total unrecognized 
thaw of the Revco' s contents under any emergency, for I had naively assumed 
that for some reason it would be checked once or more every few days. This 
was not the case, and my magical thinking and hoping has led to this catas- 
trophe in our work. Everyone is deptessed. I have tried not to show it nor 
to dwell too much upon it but it dominates all my thoughts. 
Tomorrow I will do all possible to determine when was the last time we 
know it was all frozen. Perhaps Frangoise would know best, since she put 
into it the last virus isolation specimens. If those happened to be the 
few from Rennell which I pleaded with her to try to get into the Revco, we 
would be much better off, for that would have been on November 6th, and we 
could expect three or more days of maintained cold after failure, I believe. 
At the very best, however, we must allow for several days of warming to low 
non-freezing temperatures. That is enough to ruin much in red cell enzyme 
worki Perhaps the hemoglobin J Tongariki and other hemoglobin studies may 
be retrieved. 
I am already planning a return and repetition of the bleeding to repair 
the loss. It cannot be very soon, but it must be done I 
Earlier in the morning I have sent radio messages to Paul trying to 
arrange every possible security for the dry ice shipment of the Revco contents 
from Ponape. Now it is a farce, but we shall go through with it. 
What we have from all this enormous bleeding effort is a little more than 
I have regularly achieved over the last twenty years of bleeding alone on 
remote islands without any Alpha Rellx or professional assistance from 
colleagues. Namely, serum promptly frozen and chilled red cells for blood 
groups and types. This remains a successful collection, almost ideally 
collected and preserved, and I can continue to hope that red cell and serum 
factors will be had for the whole island groups we have studied. If the 
last 800 specimens are through OK to Canberra today, perhaps Tikopia 
through Bellona are covered for red cell enzymes adequately. However, 
the most important and exciting islands, Anuta and the Torres group and all 
the Banks are lost unless miraculously we caught the thaw just as it was 
"warming up", and the specimens had been well-frozen until a day ago... we 
have no way of knowing. The failure to have an alarm system on the Revco 
independent of the temperature gauge is obviously Indefensible, and we have 
all been most stupid. The magnitude of my disappointment I cannot well assess 
I can only see my dogged determination to wring from what we have all that 
I had expected the Alpha Helix to permit us to do and which it has not. 
Thus, the virus, tissue culture, white cell typing and red cell enzyme 
studies, on which I most justified the use of the ship, have not come off. 
I now have a challenge to aim at, for we must find a way of doing these 
correctly on these same remote populations, and I shall surely do so soon 
and carry it through. 
