The walk starts where marrow transplantation was pioneered

Fred Hutchinson Cancer Center occupies a fifteen-acre campus at 1100 Fairview Avenue North, in Seattle's South Lake Union neighborhood. It describes itself as an independent organization that serves as UW Medicine's cancer program, and that double identity is the accurate one. The work did not begin here, and it did not begin in Seattle. E. Donnall Thomas started on marrow transplantation in 1955 at the Mary Imogene Bassett Hospital in Cooperstown, New York, at the invitation of Joseph Ferrebee, and wrote later that most of the basic concepts were laid out in those years. In 1963 he moved to Seattle at the invitation of Robert Williams, the first chairman of the University of Washington's Department of Medicine, and established his program at the Seattle Public Health Hospital. His team moved into Fred Hutch in 1975, a year after he arrived as its first director of medical oncology.

What Thomas and his colleagues worked out was how to destroy a patient's diseased marrow with high doses of chemotherapy and radiation and then rebuild their blood from a healthy donor's cells. Fred Hutch dates the beginning of that work to the late 1960s, and says that for certain diseases these advances raised survival rates from zero to upwards of 90 percent. In 1990 Thomas received the Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine, shared equally with the surgeon Joseph E. Murray, "for their discoveries concerning organ and cell transplantation in the treatment of human disease."

One date on that campus matters more to this walk than the Nobel does. In 1979 the team performed what Fred Hutch records as the first successful marrow transplant from an unrelated donor for a patient with leukemia. The patient was Laura Graves, ten years old when she was diagnosed; the donor was a laboratory technician who worked at the Hutch. She received the transplant in September 1979, survived two years, and then died of a relapse. But the donated marrow had taken, and that was the finding: marrow from a stranger could engraft in a leukemia patient. NMDP records what followed. Thanks to Sherry Graves and Robert Graves, D.V.M., other patient families, doctors, congressional support and funding from the United States Navy, a national registry of volunteers was born. It facilitated its first transplant in December 1987.

That is the chain this walk is named for. Jada Bascom needed marrow from outside her own family, and it came from Torsten Huber, a man in Germany who had joined a donor registry more than a year before she was born. Donor registers already existed elsewhere — the first, in Britain, dates to 1974 — but the United States had no national registry until the transplant in this city gave one family a reason to build one. Jeana Moore starts here because this is where the medicine already exists. What is still missing is people on the list.