The University of Washington has strong links to two 1990 Nobel Prize winners announced in October.
Dr. E. Donnall Thomas, director emeritus of the Fred Hutchinson Cancer Research Center’s Division of Clinical Research and UW professor emeritus of medicine, was awarded the Nobel Prize in medicine Oct. 8 for his pioneering work in bone marrow transplantation. He shared the prize with Dr. Joseph E. Murray of Boston’s Brigham and Women’s Hospital, who performed the world’s first successful kidney transplant.
Stanford University Professor William F. Sharpe, who taught at the UW from 1961 through 1968, shared the Nobel Memorial Prize in Economic Studies for his pioneering work in the theory of financial economics. Other economics prizewinners, announced Oct. 16, were City University of New York Professor Harry Markowitz and University of Chicago Professor Merton Miller.
Dr. Thomas pioneered the bone marrow transplant procedure, the therapy that is now considered the best treatment—and the only hope of survival—for some patients with leukemias and certain other blood-related and genetic disorders.
Thomas began his work in bone marrow transplantation in the 1950s while at MIT. In 1956, he was the first to show that marrow could be safely infused into a human patient. Later, while at Mary Imogene Bassett Hospital in Cooperstown, N.Y., and Columbia University’s College of Physicians and Surgeons in New York City, he was the first to treat acute leukemia patients with marrow transplantation.
Sharpe, who teaches finance part time at Stanford, earned his Ph.D. in economics from UCLA in 1961 and then taught at the UW for seven years. His theory of the “Capital Asset Pricing Model,” for which he won the award, was refined while he was at the UW. The theory explains the relationship between risk and return in financial markets.
“I found the crucial ingredients and the paper was published while I was at the U-Dub,” he told the Seattle Post-Intelligencer the day of. the award. “Those were days when we had pretty heavy teaching loads by today’s standards. It was obviously a very rich environment for me, and I owe a big debt to the University of Washington.”