Medical Research Council Blood Group Unit

The MRC Blood Group Unit succeeded the Galton Laboratory Serum Unit set up in 1935 under the direction of Professor (later Sir) Ronald Fisher and financed through the Medical Research Council by the Rockefeller Foundation. The Serum Unit was based at University College, London, and re-located to Cambridge during the Second World War. In 1946, the Unit was reconstituted at the Lister Institute for Preventive Medicine as the Blood Group Research Unit, under the directorship of Dr Robert Race.

The need for safe transfusion therapy intensified blood group research in the run-up to the Second World War, and in 1940 Landsteiner and Wiener discovered the Rh factor, building on foundations laid by Levine and Stetson in 1939. From 1946 the MRC Blood Group Unit acquired an international reputation in the highly specialised field of haematology, extending its work in 1965 into the genetics of blood groups. Upon the retirement of Dr Race in 1973, Dr Ruth Sanger became director of the Unit. Under Dr Sanger's direction, the Unit continued to make a unique contribution to the identification of blood groups, and to the applications of the blood group systems to the problems of human genetics. In 1983, upon the retirement of Dr Sanger, Dr Patricia Tippett became director. The MRC Blood Group Unit moved from the Lister Institute to premises at University College, London in 1975. It was disbanded in September 1995, although its work continues in other research centres.