Fred Appelbaum on the genesis of bone marrow transplantation and Don Thomas’s Nobel-prize-winning discoveries
Description
In this episode, Frederick Appelbaum, executive vice president, professor in the Clinical Research Division, and Metcalfe Family/Frederick Appelbaum Endowed Chair in Cancer Research at Fred Hutchinson Cancer Center, speaks with Alexandria Carolan, associate editor with the Cancer History Project.
Delving deep into Thomas’s role in discovering bone marrow transplantation and its role in curing hematologic cancers, Appelbaum, who became Thomas’s mentee and collaborator, wrote “Living Medicine: Don Thomas, Marrow Transplantation, and the Cell Therapy Revolution.”
“If it hadn't been told, and if the story had been lost to history, I just thought that would be a tragedy,” Appelbaum said to The Cancer Letter. “We've gone from a setting where Don and just one or two other people were the only ones that thought marrow transplantation was even possible in the 1950s, to today, where there are 100,000 transplants performed worldwide every year and 40 million people have signed up and registered to be potential stem cell donors.”
A transcript of this recording appears on the Cancer History Project.
United States
