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Caitlin Raymond: The People With “Golden Blood”

Caitlin Raymond/ LinkedIn

Sep 7, 2026, 17:03

Caitlin Raymond: The People With “Golden Blood”

Caitlin Raymond, Assistant Professor of Pathology and Transfusion Medicine at University of Wisconsin-Madison, shared a post on LinkedIn:

”There is no supply chain for golden blood. There is a short list of names.

In 1961, a blood bank in Melbourne ran a routine test on an Aboriginal Australian woman and found nothing. No reaction to anti-D, anti-C, anti-E, none of it. She had Rh-null, the phenotype missing the entire Rh antigen system rather than just the single antigen most of us mean when we say “Rh negative.”

Sixty-some years later, fewer than 50 people worldwide are confirmed to have it. Maybe nine are actively donating at any given time.

You can’t stockpile that the normal way:

Standard red cells last approximately 42 days refrigerated

Rh-null units get frozen and glycerolized instead, stretching shelf life to a decade or more

A global registry (International Rare Donor Panel, run out of Bristol since 1965) tracks both the frozen units and the donors themselves

Here’s the part that stuck with me longest.

If you carry this phenotype, you’re advised to bank your own blood in advance, because waiting on the network in a true emergency is a bad plan with worse alternatives.

You’re advised to think twice before traveling somewhere without fast access to frozen rare stock.

You are, in a real sense, on call for people you will never meet, and they are on call for you.

I wrote about how this network actually works, and the question I couldn’t fully answer by the end: what do we owe the people who are, quite literally, irreplaceable?”

Caitlin Raymond: The People With “Golden Blood”