The telegram. Podcasts. Plasma has a nickname. It's called Liquid Gold.

I compared the price of plasma to the price of gold and it was much more expensive.

Douglas star wrote the book on blood. Blood is something that just goes to the heart of us

and who we are and how we think. And I can't think of any other part of the human body that

carries such resonance. He tells me how this natural life force came to be such a precious material.

The story begins in ancient times with a mystical reputation.

Blood was sacred to the Egyptians, to the Romans. The Greek sought as one of the four humors

and was thought to ebb and flow through the body and maintain the balance of everything.

And that's why when people were sick, physicians would erroneously bleed them.

The meaning of blood is fluid through history, from the Bible to the Gothic. It has the power

to give life and take it away. Why is it that the vampire Dracula drank people's blood?

Because there's something scary and mysterious about blood.

With the advent of the modern age, it lost its mystique and became a tool in war.

As blood was shared on the battlefields of the Second World War, plasma became a savior of wounded

allied soldiers. We had a program called Plasma for Britain in which blood was collected in New York

City spun out and tons of it were shipped to London to help during the blitz.

Blood collection was top secret, and while the Allies had thousands upon thousands of

gallons of blood coming in, the Nazis had virtually none.

Out of the ashes of war came a new era of advanced surgery and medical treatment.

More and more blood was needed and so began the plasma gold rush.

And this is when people who came up with all sorts of ways of collecting blood on a larger scale.

The race was unbridled. Farmer companies went into prisons and nightclubs.

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