Georges Mathé

Georges Mathé (9 July 1922 – 15 October 2010) was a French oncologist and immunologist. In November 1958, he performed the first successful allogeneic bone marrow transplant ever performed on unrelated human beings.

Georges Mathé was born in 1922 in the village of Sermages, France, from a rural family. Selected by his village school master, he was sent to study in a boarding school in Moulins, Allier.

During World War II, he participated in the French Resistance, and studied to become a medical doctor in Paris. He graduated in 1950–51 with honors.

He engaged in medical research in the early fifties, and took an internship in immunology and oncology in the Memorial Sloan–Kettering Cancer Center, New York.

He specialised in hematology when working with Pr. Paul Chevallier and Pr. Jean Bernard, and devoting himself to child leukemia.

In November 1958, Mathé performed the first bone marrow graft between unrelated donors and hosts ever made in the world, in order to save six Yugoslavian nuclear researchers who had been accidentally irradiated. That event made him aware of the possibility and necessity of developing active and adoptive immunotherapy and applying it to the treatment of cancers.

He also participated with René Kuss and Marcel Legrain in 1960 and 61 to the first successful kidney grafts between non related donors and hosts.

By 1963 he "shook the medical world" when he announced he had cured a patient of leukemia by means of a bone marrow transplant. He later showed that stem cells could not only heal radiation damage, but also fight cancer. He also demonstrated the positive role of BCG combined with irradiated tumoral cells.

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