John Raymond Hobbs - Medicine

Medicine

He specialised in Pathology and in 1963 was appointed consultant at Hammersmith Hospital, London. In 1970 he was appointed as Professor of Chemical Pathology at Westminster Medical School. In the early 1970s Professor Hobbs’s Westminster team were doing ground breaking work. In 1970 the world’s first successful intended stem cell transplant for a previously fatal human disease. In 1971 the first British Bone Marrow Transplant using bone marrow from a matching sibling. In the following year a transplant was successful using the bone marrow from father to son. In April 1973 Professor Hobbs and his team were able to achieve the world's first bone marrow transplant using a matched but unrelated volunteer donor. With the success of this procedure steps were taken by professor Hobbs's team to set up the world's first unrelated bone marrow donor register. The tissue typing specialist of the team, Dr David James, was instrumental in the setting up and the administration of this ground breaking register which was later named after Anthony Nolan. It established the future use of unrelated donors to patients, so far for over 10,000 people. This initiative was the blue print which would be copied around the world. The Westminster team completed 285 transplants before it and its specialist unit’s sudden, unexpected, enforced closure, effectively in autumn of 1992. Tragically, this left a waiting list of children with virtually nowhere else in Britain to go for treatment of their genetic diseases and inborn errors. However Professor Hobbs had founded the COrrection of GEnetic diseases by Transplantation or COGENT movement, with a charitable trust which attracted £13 million 1971–2007. The remaining balance, with the assistance of the late Professor Anthony Oakhill, was used to create a new unit at the Royal Hospital for Sick Children in the city of Bristol, and so allowing work to be continued. It is now headed by Dr Colin Steward MA (Cantab), BM, BCh (Oxon), PhD (Bristol), FRCPCH, FRCP. As for the children who were treated by Professor Hobbs’s bone marrow team at the Westminster hospital, most of these children now enjoy full lives as adults.