Haleema Shakur Still

And they felt it didn't have the treatments that could save their lives.

So we went away and started looking at, you know, what else could be done for women who bleed to death.

And at the same time, we were doing the CRASH-2 trial of tranexamic acid in trauma patients.

we started looking at whether it could be useful for women.

And we started the woman trial even before we knew the results of the CRASH-2 trial.

Interesting.

Tranexamic acid has this amazing story.

It really is a story of struggle and misogyny and everything bad you can imagine in science.

Imagine Japan after the Second World War having had two bombs dropped on it.

And there is someone working there who still believed in humanity.

And there was this amazing woman called Otoko Okamoto.

At the time she was working in Japan, women were still dying in huge numbers in childbirth.

And she wanted to find better ways of looking after these women.

She wanted to save their lives.

And post-war Japan wasn't an easy place to do research.

But if you had your own blood, you could work on your own blood if you couldn't afford to buy reagents and everything else.

So she decided she was going to work on their own blood because then they didn't have to spend money or find reagents or cell lines or all the other things you needed money for.

But what was driving her was that she actually said she wanted to do something for humanity.

So she set about discovering a treatment that could stop bleeding.

And she did discover this treatment called tranexamic acid.