Percy Lane Oliver

Percy Lane Oliver was a British civil servant credited with founding the world's first organized volunteer blood donation service. While working for the Camberwell division of the British Red Cross in London in 1921, he responded to a hospital's urgent call for a blood donor, an experience that led him to build a panel of volunteers whose blood types were already known and who were willing to donate on request, unpaid, at any hour. Oliver ran the service from his own London home, and it grew from about 20 volunteers at its founding to roughly 2,700 by 1938. His model of organized, unpaid, on call blood donation was subsequently adopted across Britain and copied by blood services in other countries, laying groundwork for the voluntary blood donation systems hospitals still depend on today.