E. Donnall Thomas

Edward Donnall Thomas, known as Don, was an American physician, born in Mart, Texas, who became professor emeritus at the University of Washington and director emeritus of the clinical research division at the Fred Hutchinson Cancer Research Center in Seattle. He studied chemistry and chemical engineering at the University of Texas at Austin and received his Doctor of Medicine from Harvard Medical School in 1946. At the Mary Imogene Bassett Hospital in Cooperstown, New York, he studied rodents that received lethal doses of radiation and were saved by an infusion of marrow cells, then used dogs as a model system, and in 1963 he moved his laboratory to Seattle. With his wife and research partner Dottie Thomas he developed bone marrow transplantation as a treatment for leukemia, and in 1990 he shared the Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine with Joseph E. Murray for the development of cell and organ transplantation. His record also includes a contested episode: from 1981 to 1993 he was a lead investigator in a failed series of experimental treatments for leukemia and graft-versus-host disease at Fred Hutchinson, in which participants were not told of a potential financial conflict of interest and 84 of 85 died. He died on 20 October 2012.