Dr. E. Donnall Thomas, who showed that it was possible to transplant bone marrow to save the lives of patients dying from blood cancer and other blood disorders, a discovery that earned him a Nobel Prize, died on Saturday in Seattle. He was 92.
His death was announced by the Fred Hutchinson Cancer Research Center in Seattle, where he had long been on the faculty.
When Dr. Thomas began his research in the late 1950s, bone marrow transplants were seen as a frightening last resort. Patients suffered dangerous complications from the procedure, and survival rates were grim. The patient's immune system would either destroy the transplanted marrow as foreign, or the transplanted marrow, which contains immune system cells, would destroy the patient's lungs, kidneys and other organs.
The only successes were in identical twins because their tissue types matched.
Many physicians abandoned the approach, believing that bone marrow transplantation would never be safe enough to be practical. Dr. Thomas persevered, despite numerous failures and the criticism that he was exposing his patients to undue risks. He learned to match tissue types between recipients and donors, and to use drugs to tamp down the immune system.
His team carried out its first transplant using a matched sibling donor for a patient with leukemia in 1969. Eight years later, the team performed the first matched transplant from an unrelated donor, a success that led to the formation of a national registry that now includes more than 11 million marrow donors.
Dr. Thomas received the 1990 Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine with Dr. Joseph E. Murray, who performed the first successful kidney transplant. In announcing the prize, the Karolinska Institute said discoveries by both men were "crucial for those tens of thousands of severely ill patients who either can be cured or given a decent life when other treatment methods are without success."
Today, bone marrow transplants are an accepted treatment for leukemia and other blood cancers, and can cure some inherited forms of anemia, like sickle cell disease.
Edward Donnall Thomas was born on March 15, 1920, in Mart, Texas, a rural town about 100 miles south of Dallas. He was the only child of Dr. Edward E. Thomas, a general practitioner, and Angie Hill Donnall, a teacher. He learned to hunt and fish, and as an adult, he would unwind after a hard day by filling shells with gunpowder.
He studied chemistry at the University of Texas at Austin, receiving his bachelor's degree in 1941 and his master's degree in 1943.
To pay for his education, he worked odd jobs around campus. After a shift waiting tables at a women's dormitory, he got into a snowball fight with a journalism student, Dorothy Martin. The couple married in 1942, and soon afterward, his wife shifted her career ambitions to become his laboratory technician and lifelong collaborator.
Dr. Thomas went on to Harvard Medical School, where he became interested in leukemia and bone marrow. He received his medical degree in 1946, spent two years in the Army, then returned to Boston to complete his residency and conduct research. In 1955, he was appointed physician in chief at the Mary Imogene Bassett Hospital, now Bassett Medical Center, in Cooperstown, N.Y., an affiliate of Columbia University.
As soon as he arrived, Dr. Thomas started experimenting with bone marrow transplants in dogs, to work out the technical problems, and in people dying of leukemia. He reasoned that replacing a patient's diseased marrow with that from a healthy donor could cure leukemia. By 1957, his team had performed marrow transplants on six patients, after first destroying the patients' own marrow with radiation. The results were dismal. None of the patients survived beyond 100 days.
"Most people left the field," Dr. Thomas told an interviewer. "They felt that this couldn't ever be done." Some physicians felt strongly that the transplants "shouldn't go on as an experimental thing," he said.
Dr. Thomas found that dogs given whole-body radiation and marrow from their litter mates had the same problems that humans did with infection, rejection and graft-versus-host disease, in which immune cells in the graft attack the patient's organs as foreign. But occasionally, a dog survived the procedure and remained healthy. Dr. Thomas surmised that matching donors to patients was crucial.
This article has been revised to reflect the following correction:
Correction: October 21, 2012
An earlier version of this obituary referred incorrectly to the Fred Hutchinson Cancer Research Center, where Dr. Thomas was on the faculty for many years. It is an independent entity; it is not affiliated with the University of Washington.
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