In 1970, in the journal Blood, a second-year medical student named Frederick Appelbaum read a paper describing a 46-year-old man with blastic crisis of chronic myelogenous leukemia who was given 950 rads whole-body irradiation followed immediately by 17.6 x 109 marrow cells.
To rescue this patient from this lethal dose, the study’s senior author—E. Donnall Thomas—injected marrow cells from the patient’s sister into the patient, and the cells successfully grafted.
