In 1940, with the likelihood of America's involvement in World War II steadily rising, the U.S. military approached Cohn about developing medical products from blood proteins to treat shock and blood loss in soldiers. Cohn's team quickly invented methods to make blood albumin, which had a notable positive impact on soldiers' survival from the earliest days of the American war effort. During the Normandy beach landings, many wounded soldiers were treated with Cohn's albumin products. And, by the end of 1945, his Harvard team of scientists were so effective at turning lab discoveries into commercial-scale products that millions of Cohn's blood products were used in all theaters of the war effort. Cohn's success is all the more remarkable today because, prior to the war, he rarely considered 'applied' research, instead favoring theoretical work on the molecular properties of proteins. Ever the purist, Cohn was once described by James Conant, Harvard's president, as 'hopelessly high hat...
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