Dr. Robert Good, RIP

A diagnosis of leukemia used to be a death sentence. Thanks to the heroic work of Dr. Robert Good at the University of Minnesota Medical School and Hospital, bone marrow transplants have become the treatment of choice for previously untreatable immunological diseases such as leukemia. Dr. Good performed the first successful human bone marrow transplant at the University of Minnesota in 1968 on a four-month-old baby boy. Now bone marrow donor registries and banks exist all over the world to facilitate the treatment of immunological diseases with the procedure pioneered by Dr. Good.
On Friday evening Dr. Good died at the age of 81 in St. Petersburg, Florida. He is survived by his then-four-month-old patient, now the father of twins. The AP obituary is “Robert A. Good, pioneer in bone marrow surgery, dies.”