David and Goliath: Underdogs, Misfits, and the Art of Battling Giants

you say that kind of thing to,” Dick
Silver, who worked at NCI with
Freireich, says. “Jay didn’t care.”
Freireich went out and recruited
blood donors. The father of one of his
patients was a minister, and he brought
in twenty members of his congregation.
Standard procedure in blood
transfusions in the mid-1950s was steel
needles, rubber tubes, and glass bottles.
But it turned out that platelets stuck to
those surfaces. So Freireich had the idea
of switching to the brand-new
technology of silicon needles and plastic
bags. The bags were called sausages.
They were enormous. “They were this
big,” said Vince DeVita, who was one