Edward Donnall Thomas

Edward Donnall "Don" Thomas (born March 15, 1920 in Mart near Waco , Texas ; † October 20, 2012 in Seattle , Washington ) was an American physician and one of the most important American transplant specialists and hematologists . The 1990 Nobel Prize in Medicine was Professor Emeritus at the University of Washington .

Thomas studied chemistry and chemical engineering at the University of Texas at Austin , where he received his bachelor's degree in 1941 and his master's degree in 1943 , both in organic chemistry . He then studied medicine at Harvard Medical School , where he earned his MD in 1946 . He then moved to the Peter Bent Brigham Hospital in Boston as an assistant doctor , where he also came into contact with the surgeon Joseph E. Murray , with whom he later received the Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine . He also served in the United States Army . In 1950 he returned to the scientific community, initially as a research assistant at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology , from 1953 to 1955 at the Peter Bent Brigham Hospital as a specialist in hematology (diseases of the blood system) and as a professor of medicine at Harvard University .

In 1955 Thomas was appointed chief physician at the Mary Imogene Bassett Hospital in Cooperstown (New York) . It was there that he first became familiar with the discovery that rodents exposed to a potentially lethal dose of radioactivity survived if they were given cells intravenously from a donor's bone marrow . In 1957 he first used this method on a patient suffering from leukemia: he irradiated him with a high dose to kill the cancer cells; then he infused him with bone marrow cells from his identical brother .

Both this first patient and numerous other people treated by similar colleagues later died as a result of infections or severe immune reactions that had not been observed in the animal experiments. As early as 1957, Thomas therefore began to experiment with dogs in order to improve the therapeutic success and thus did pioneering work in the transplantation of stem cells from the bone marrow.

From 1963 he worked at the United States Public Health Service Hospital (USPHS) in Seattle, which was connected with the medical department of the University of Washington. Here he was professor from 1963 to 1989, from 1985 head of the oncology department and after the closure of the USPHS from 1974 director of the department for medical oncology at the Fred Hutchinson Cancer Research Center in Seattle. From 1969 he had resumed the treatment of patients with stem cells at the USPHS. It took ten years before the immune reactions - known today as the graft-versus-host reaction - were understood in his work group and then controllable elsewhere.

In 1980 Thomas was awarded the Charles F. Kettering Prize from the General Motors Cancer Research Foundation. He was inducted into the National Academy of Sciences in 1982. In 1987 he cured the tenor José Carreras of his acute leukemia with an autologous stem cell transplant . That year he was awarded the Karl Landsteiner Memorial Award . In 1990 he and Joseph E. Murray received the Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine for their introduction in the 1950s of the method of tissue and organ transfer as a clinical treatment practice in human medicine , as well as the National Medal of Science and a Gairdner Foundation International Award . In 1992 Thomas was awarded the George M. Kober Medal .

He was married to his former fellow student, the journalist Dorothy Martin (1922-2015), with whom he had three children, since 1942.

literature

Rainer Storb : Edward Donnall Thomas (1920–2012). In: Nature . Volume 491, No. 7424, 2012, p. 334, doi: 10.1038 / 491334a
Frederick R. Appelbaum: E. Donnall Thomas (1920–2012). In: Science . Volume 338, No. 6111, 2012, p. 1163, doi: 10.1126 / science.1232395
Denise Gellene: E. Donnall Thomas, Who Advanced Bone Marrow Transplants, Dies at 92. In: The New York Times . October 21, 2012.
Melissa Allison: E. Donnall Thomas, Nobel winner for bone-marrow transplant advances. In: The Seattle Times. 20th October 2012
E. Donnall Thomas , in: Internationales Biographisches Archiv 07/2010 from February 16, 2010, in the Munzinger archive ( beginning of article freely accessible)
Gisela Baumgart: Thomas, Edward Donnall. In: Werner E. Gerabek , Bernhard D. Haage, Gundolf Keil , Wolfgang Wegner (eds.): Enzyklopädie Medizingeschichte. De Gruyter, Berlin / New York 2005, ISBN 3-11-015714-4 , p. 1396.

Web links

Commons : E. Donnall Thomas - Collection of images, videos and audio files

E. Donnall Thomas in nndb (English)
Information from the Nobel Foundation on the awarding of the 1990 prize to Edward Donnall Thomas

Individual evidence

^ Gisela Baumgart: Thomas, Edward Donnall. 2005.
↑ Sam Roberts: Dorothy Thomas, the 'Mother' of Bone Marrow Transplants, Dies at 92. In: The New York Times, January 16, 2015 (accessed January 17, 2015).

personal data
SURNAME	Thomas, Edward Donnall
ALTERNATIVE NAMES	Thomas, Don (nickname)
BRIEF DESCRIPTION	American medic
DATE OF BIRTH	March 15, 1920
PLACE OF BIRTH	Mart near Waco , Texas
DATE OF DEATH	20th October 2012
Place of death	Seattle , Washington

[1] Gisela Baumgart: Thomas, Edward Donnall. 2005.

[2] Sam Roberts: Dorothy Thomas, the 'Mother' of Bone Marrow Transplants, Dies at 92. In: The New York Times, January 16, 2015 (accessed January 17, 2015).