Bone marrow transplants, used routinely for leukemia and other diseases, worked only in identical twins until the first successful transplants involving other siblings as donors took place 50 years ago in Madison and Minneapolis.Dr. Fritz Bach, a UW-Madison geneticist, developed a lab test to see if donor and recipient cells matched. The test allowed Bach and Dr. Robert Good of the University of Minnesota to give two young boys who had serious blood disorders healthy immune systems from their sisters in August and September 1968.
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