In London, huge crowds waited in long lines and even camped out overnight to get tickets. Tutankhamun fever invaded America with a King Tut show that toured the country later in the 1970s. Of late, with costs up and funding down, blockbuster shows may be going out of fashion, but museum flair and care live on. It was two decades ago that sickle cell anemia began to get serious national attention, in part because of the man featured in our story, Dr. Rudolph Ellsworth Jackson. An African-American specialist in blood research, he had just been named director of a new National Institutes of Health task force aimed at its prevention and cure.
Sickle cell is a blood disease, genetically transmitted.
It mainly afflicts black people, and is especially painful and dangerous to very young children. About 10 percent of black Americans carry the trait but do not suffer from the disease. If you have it, some of your hemoglobin, which carries oxygen to the body, sporadically starts to curl and cling together, clogging blood vessels and reducing the flow of blood to the tissues. Some sickle cell children suffer strokes. And they are also at risk from meningitis and pneumonia.