Harrington & Hollingsworth

In a classic 1951 study, WJ Harrington and JW Hollingsworth designed an experiment to establish the autoimmune etiology of ITP. For the experiment they decided to infuse one of them with a liter of an ITP patient’s blood. Since Dr. Harrington had the same blood type as the designated ITP patient’s blood, he volunteered to infuse himself with the blood. Dr. Harrington quickly developed severe, but transient, thrombocytopenia. The first time Dr. Harrington conducted the experiment, he slept upright for a week, afraid that he would have a stroke. Dr. Harrington repeated this experiment on himself as many as 35 times over 2 years. He later recruited several volunteers to undergo the same experiment. The normal subjects briefly had similar levels of platelet destruction and recovery as that of ITP patients. These experiments confirmed that there was an antiplatelet factor in ITP plasma. Eventually, this led to the discovery that in ITP, the body’s own immune system was responsible for creating antibodies against one’s own platelets.^8-10

One of the volunteers had had an earlier splenectomy and still developed thrombocytopenia. This was evidence that the spleen was not the sole site of platelet destruction.^8,9

Harrington WJ, Minnich V, Hollingsworth JW, et al. Demonstration of a thrombocytopenic factor in the blood of patients with thrombocytopenic purpura.
J Lab Clin Med. 1951;38:1-10.

Harrington WJ, Minnich V, Hollingsworth JW, Moore CV. Demonstration of a thrombocytopenic factor in the blood of patients with thrombocytopenic purpura. 1951. J Lab Clin Med. 1990;115(5):636-45.

References