Founding of Fred Hutchinson Cancer Research Center

Although the doors to Fred Hutchinson opened in 1975, the history of the center actually began nearly 20 years earlier with the vision of Seattle surgeon Dr. William Hutchinson, brother of baseball hero Fred Hutchinson. Hutchinson dreamed of an organization that would provide funds and laboratory space that would allow physicians to pursue their research. In 1956, with the help of the U.S. Department of Public Health, he founded the Pacific Northwest Research Foundation. Initial study focused on heart surgery, cancer and endocrine diseases.

By 1962, Hutchinson envisioned another dream; a center devoted specifically to the study of cancer. After his beloved brother Fred died of cancer in 1964, the idea took shape, and Fred Hutchinson Cancer Research Center was established in 1965 as the cancer division of the Foundation.

At the same time, Dr. E. Donnall Thomas and his colleagues on the East Coast had worked for decades on an innovative treatment for cancers of the blood. In the 1950s, they showed that dogs could be protected against lethal doses of irradiation by intravenous injection of bone-marrow cells. Thomas believed this had potential clinical applications for the treatment of leukemia in humans, and he set out to prove it.

Through painstaking laboratory and clinical research, Thomas improved the technique. In 1963, he came to Seattle to become the first director of the Division of Oncology at the University of Washington. Local institutions provided space for his radical yet promising transplant research. During the next few years, researchers from all over the world came to work with Thomas to do what most people were convinced would never work — to cure cancer by transplanting human bone marrow after lethal doses of chemotherapy and radiation. What the team needed, however, was a permanent home to conduct their research.

At the Hutchinson Center, Thomas found that home. Hutchinson incorporated the center as an independent research institution in 1972. With the help of Washington state's legendary U.S. Senator Warren Magnuson and the Seattle community, federal and private funding led to the construction and opening of center's first home in Seattle's First Hill neighborhood in 1975.

Today, Fred Hutchinson Cancer Research Center is an institution of world-renowned depth and variety and home of three Nobel laureate. More than 2,300 scientists and staff conduct research to understand, treat and prevent cancer, HIV/AIDS and other life-threatening diseases.

Watch a video about professional baseball coach and player Fred Hutchinson and his brother Bill, a medical doctor and cancer researcher, who founded Fred Hutchinson Cancer Research Center. Watch it now »