In 1987, at the age of 40, world-renowned Spanish tenor José Carreras was diagnosed with an acute form of leukemia and given long odds of survival. He underwent a bone marrow transplant at Fred Hutchinson Cancer Research Center that would cure his disease. A year later, in gratitude, he established a Barcelona-based foundation to support and promote the kind of research that saved his life. That research was pioneered by Fred Hutch’s Dr. E. Donnall Thomas, who received a Nobel Prize in 1990 for developing BMT.
Today, three decades later, the lives of Carreras and Thomas, who died in 2012 at the age of 90, continue to be intertwined through an endowed chair named in their honor that was established in 2007 by the Seattle-based Friends of José Carreras International Leukemia Foundation.
