E. Donnall Thomas

Edward Donnall "Don" Thomas ( born March 15, 1920 in Mart in Waco, Texas; † 20 October 2012 in Seattle, Washington) was an American physician. The Nobel Prize for Medicine of 1990 was professor emeritus of the University of Washington.

Thomas studied chemistry and chemical engineering at the University of Texas at Austin, where he 1941 and 1943 Bachelor's degree Master's degree earned, each specialized in Organic Chemistry. He then studied medicine at Harvard Medical School, where he 1946 he received his MD degree earned. Following this, he moved to Boston to the Peter Bent Brigham Hospital and made from military service in the United States Army. In 1950, he returned to academic life, first as a research associate at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology and then as a university professor of medicine at Harvard University.

1955 Thomas was appointed chief physician to the Mary Imogene Bassett Hospital in Cooperstown (New York). There he was first acquainted with the discovery that rodents that a potentially lethal dose exposed to radioactivity, survived when they zuführte intravenously cells from the bone marrow of a donor. In 1957 he was the first to this method in a leukemia patient: he irradiated it with a high dose of radioactivity to kill cancer cells; after which he infused his bone marrow cells from his identical brother.

Both this first patient, as well as numerous other similar peer- treated people later died of complications from infection, or severe immune reactions that had not been observed in animal experiments. In 1957 Thomas began therefore to experiment with dogs to improve the therapeutic results and as a pioneer in 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 Faculty of Medicine of the University of Washington. Here he remained until 1989, professor and after closure of the USPHS Director of the substitute founded Fred Hutchinson Cancer Research Center in Seattle. From 1969 he participated in the USPHS treating patients with stem on again. It took ten years for the immune responses - now known as graft-versus- host disease - understood in its workgroup and then elsewhere were manageable.

1980 Thomas was awarded the Charles F. Kettering Prize from the General Motors Cancer Research Foundation. He was admitted in 1982 to the National Academy of Sciences. With an autologous stem cell transplant in 1987 he healed the tenor José Carreras of his acute leukemia. This year he was awarded the Karl Landsteiner Memorial Award. In 1990 he received along with Joseph E. Murray received the Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine for their introduction to the method of transfer of tissues and organs in clinical management practices in human medicine, and the National Medal of Science and a Gairdner Foundation International Award.

He was married in 1942 with his former fellow student, the journalist Dorothy Martin, with whom he had three children.