Happy Nurses Week,

Last Friday I became a husband, tying the knot down in the Lowcountry of Savannah, Georgia. Highly recommend getting all your friends and family together in one place. Even more highly recommend marrying someone you really like. That’s all my unsolicited marriage advice I’ve got one week in.

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Seattle Soundbites

1. Governor Bob Ferguson signed a rent control bill that caps increases at 7% + inflation: HB 1217.

2. The University of Washington has suspended 21 students who occupied a campus building. The protestors were demanding the school sever ties with Boeing over the company supplying weapons to Israel.

Seattle's Biomedical Legacy & The NIH Funding Crisis

Bone marrow transplantation, a revolutionary medical procedure discovered in the late 1950s, has transformed the fight against blood diseases like leukemia from a virtual death sentence into a treatable condition. It’s a treatment with deep roots in our little corner of the world, where pioneering physician Dr. E. Donnall Thomas persevered through decades of skepticism to develop what would become one of medicine's most important innovations.

His legacy continues at the Fred Hutch Cancer Center in South Lake Union. On May 1, Fred Hutch announced a lay off, citing a slowdown in federal funding for HIV grants, indicating slashed National Institutes of Health (NIH) funding is beginning to rear its head.

Discovery In Blood

In 1957, Dr. Thomas published a landmark paper in the New England Journal of Medicine, demonstrating for the first time that human bone marrow could be safely collected and administered intravenously. During the 1960s and 1970s, in the face of widespread doubt from the medical community, Thomas and his research team refined the procedure, convinced of its propensity to save lives.

It is right here in Seattle where Dr. Thomas tirelessly worked towards this breakthrough.

Dr. Thomas made significant headway when his team discovered how to eradicate malignant white blood cells in bone marrow using chemotherapy and radiation, then replace them with healthy donor cells. This approach represented "the first definitive and reproducible example of the human immune system's potential to eliminate cancer," an achievement that earned Thomas the Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine in 1990.

Seattle, A Quiet Biomedical Powerhouse

Since the discovery of this method, bone marrow transplantation research has continued in earnest in the PNW. While lacking the university saturation of Boston, or the sheer talent density of the Bay Area, the Puget Sound has nonetheless established itself as an important center for biomedical innovation and life science research, becoming one of the top 10 largest biomedical markets in the US.