Dr. Carl W. Walter; Inventor of Blood Bag

Carl W. Walter, 86, a pioneer in the transfusion and storage of blood and a Harvard Medical School professor for 40 years. Walter is perhaps best known for inventing the plastic bags still universally used to collect and transport blood. Walter, a surgeon, also established one of the world’s first blood banks, in 1934 in a basement room at Harvard--an obscure location chosen because some trustees thought the storage and use of human blood was “immoral and unethical.” He invented the blood bag 15 years later, making it possible to end a cumbersome and dangerous procedure by which doctors pumped blood directly from donor to patient via paraffin-coated glass tubes heated over alcohol lamps. In Boston on Tuesday of the complications of a stroke.