Chapter 03: Perfecting the Blood Separator in the Department of Developmental Therapeutics: Shifting MD Anderson Culture to Innovative Research

Dr. Freireich explains why the slow evolution of the blood separator made it necessary for him to leave the NCI and join MD Anderson in 1965. He speaks at length about R. Lee Clark, a giant of a person (who visited Dr. Freireich\u27s family at home in order to convince him to come to Houston). He compares leukemia treatment services at NCI and the primitive situation for clinical research at MD Anderson. The faculty, he notes, saw his treatment/research approaches as potentially disruptive. He illustrates Dr. Clark\u27s political skill in the face of this enmity: Dr. Clark rented a mobile home and set it up in a parking lot, where Dr. Freireich and Dr Frei (his close colleague from NCI who also joined MD Anderson in the sixties) established the new Department of Developmental Therapeutics. Dr. Freireich describes the process of establishing a fully functioning program in two years. He also describes tensions in the institutin as Developmental Therapeutics presented a new model of innovative research on treatments other than surgery. He explains how they finalized the design of the continuous blood separator (Model 2997), and he describes how the device and innovations it stimulated led to a revolution in stem cells transfusion.https://openworks.mdanderson.org/mchv_interviewchapters/1022/thumbnail.jp