PIONEER IN BLOOD PLASMA: Dr. Charles Richard Drew

Although Richard Hardwick's biography (1967, p. 1288, J-476) was somewhat sluggish, overstimulation is no remedy. Here is Negro doctor-to-be Drew scanning a segregated D.C. swimming pool: ""Poor little saucer-eyed urchins with washboard ribs and protruding belly buttons, who will help you?"" Or as a researcher envisioning the potential of blood plasma in the middle of the night: ""Charley, are you asleep?"" ""No. . . but I believe I have been all along."" Another episode has intimations of Imitation of Life, and the courtship of his wife is a mockery (""Moonlight is so very gentle to Negroes, Lenore. How rich and impossible was your beauty when I first saw it, but how indescribably perfect it is in this magic light. . .""). The facts of his life and career are here, but embedded in tasteless-to-trite dramatization throughout.