On Feb. 17 this year, an 88-year-old man passed away in his sleep at a nursing home in Australia. His name is James Harrison, who was the person who has donated the most blood in Australia’s history, and has extended his arm 1173 times, so people affectionately called him “golden arm guy.”

“In 1951, I had chest surgery and had one of my lungs removed. I was 14 at the time,” Harrison recalled in a live interview. “After I came out of the operating room, or a few days later, my father explained to me what happened. He said I received 13 units (liters) of blood and that unknown people saved my life. He himself was a blood donor, so I vowed, ‘I’ll be one when I grow up.’”

Not long after Harrison started donating blood, doctors called him on the phone. They said his blood could solve a fatal problem. If a pregnant woman’s blood type is Rh negative and the fetus is Rh positive, the pregnant woman can produce antibodies and destroy the fetus’s ‘outpatient’ blood cells.

Harrison’s plasma contained a rare D antibody, which scientists used to create a drug that protected approximately 2.4 million infants from disease or death in Australia. In Australia, the drug is given to all antibody-negative pregnant women as a precaution because doctors could not predict whether this nonconformity would cause serious problems. In Australia, this proportion is equivalent to about 17% of the population, or about 45,000 women each year.

“I’d see the ceiling or the nurse, maybe I’d chat with them a few words, but I’d never seen a needle stick in my arm in person. I couldn’t see the blood or hold the pain,” Harrison said.

According to the Australian Red Cross Blood Service Center, Harrison is one of about 200 donors to Australia’s 27 million population. From the age of 18 to 81, he donated blood every two weeks, first blood and then plasma. Even during his vacation, James never stopped donating, but when he and his wife, Barbara Harrison, traveled to clinics around Australia. Barbara has also donated blood several times.

After James got old, he didn’t take a car and took a train from his home in Sydney’s suburbs to his frequent donation center, which each time took more than an hour.

Jemaah Fockenmeyer of the Australian Red Cross Blood Service said, “He went to the front of the first blood donors and congratulated them and told them they were important and special. But he never revealed his story.”

“In Australia, thousands of infants died every year until about 1967, and doctors didn’t know the cause. It was horrible. Women had multiple miscarriages, and infants had serious brain damage at birth. Australia was one of the first countries to find blood donors with these antibodies.”

Harrison was considered a national hero and received numerous awards throughout his life, including the Order of Australia, one of Australia’s highest honors.