In 1953, William P. Murphy, Jr., an American doctor working with colleague Carl Walter, developed the blood bag to aid in transfusions. The blood bag, which replaced breakable glass bottles, came from Murphy’s work on dialysis machines and exposure of military personnel to radiation from the U.S. atomic weapons tests.

Murphy is the son of the American physician William Parry Murphy who shared the Nobel Prize in Physiology for Medicine in 1934, and Harriett Adams, the first licensed female dentist in Massachusetts.