Who performed the first successful human bone-marrow transplant?

The first successful transplant was performed by Dr. Thomas in Cooperstown, N.Y., in the late 1950s. The transplant involved identical twins, one of whom had leukemia. Because identical twins share the same genetic make-up, transplants between twins avoid the problems associated with non-twin transplants, such as graft-vs.-host disease. GVHD occurs when the transplanted cells (the graft) attack the patient (the host) as they would a foreign object or infection. In 1975, Thomas moved his research to Fred Hutchinson Cancer Research Center, where much of the developmental work on bone-marrow and blood stem-cell transplantation has been done. He received the Nobel Prize in physiology or medicine in 1990, along with Dr. Joseph E. Murray, who pioneered kidney transplantation.