Pioneering Hematology: The Research and Treatment of Malignant Blood Disorders -- Reflections on a Life's Work

This assisted autobiography of hematologist W. C. Moloney, who died on 3 November 1998 at age 91, describes his trajectory from a busy general practice to a Harvard professorship. He is known for his contributions to leukemia, bone-marrow analysis, and teaching. Unable to afford a residency, Moloney became a specialist virtually alone, by pursuing his interests in the laboratory diagnosis of Rh factor, bleeding disorders, and blood-transfusion problems. Working as a general practitioner and carrying his equipment around in a cigar box, he made the tests available in the smaller hospitals. Later, he spent many years in association with the laboratories and clinics of his alma mater, Tufts Medical School, and the Boston City Hospital. He helped to establish a number of laboratories and offices throughout his career, and in the book he openly describes the crucial and sometimes fickle role of funding and physical space. Regretting the eclipse of hematology by oncology, Moloney angrily resisted requests for his retirement at age seventy-three; he finally “stepped aside” under pressure at eighty-one.

Colorful anecdotes describe Moloney’s early clinical career and the medical personalities he encountered, including William Dameshek, Sydney Farber, and Alexander Weiner. His own confident and easily “fed-up” character had to have been one of the strongest in his milieu. Moloney’s Catholicism and general-practice background posed difficulties in the higher echelons of the Boston medical community; yet the opinionated, outspoken physician also had a falling-out with the “Irish mafia,” who did not appreciate his attempts to create a “world-class Catholic hospital” (pp. 63–64).

With guileless understatement, Moloney tells of medical contortions to hide experimental disasters (Paritol trials, p. 81), nuclear isotopes kept in a waiting room (p. 118), the discovery of the nonexistent “Boloney virus” (p. 129), shouting matches over research funding (p. 162), three near-crashes in airplanes, and the accidental irradiation of the Marshall Islands (pp. 143–48). His account reflects the male culture of his time and place: the jovial description of his sons’ disappointment that he “had not killed any Japanese” in the war (p. 60), and his genuine surprise at finding a distinguished Norwegian houseguest helping his wife to dry dishes (p. 80).

Most interesting to this reader was Moloney’s candid description of his work in Japan as a member of the Atomic Bomb Casualty Commission (ABCC). He was sent to Hiroshima with his family in 1952, with the task of identifying disease in victims and correlating it with estimated radiation doses. The incidence of leukemia proved not to be as high as had been expected, although Moloney thought that the media did a poor job of reporting that fact. He wrote that the Japanese displayed “surprisingly little hostility” (p. 91), but in trying to understand why so few had joined in the ABCC’s work, he attributed their standoffishness to a perception that the flattened Hiroshima was “out in the boondocks, peopled with country bumpkins” (p. 96). Moloney resented the charges—made by the media, some Japanese, and Eleanor Roosevelt—that the ABCC diagnosed but did not treat. Without trying to refute the charge, he justified the limited activity as a product of limited funding. The experience turned him into a pro-American advocate of nuclear energy and a strong critic of the media-generated “misunderstanding, fear, and hysteria” surrounding Bikini Atoll, Three Mile Island, and Chernobyl (p. 140). A mock nuclear attack on Houston led him to wonder about the military uses, but he frequently served as an expert witness for the defense in trials for work-related injuries. “Radiation is not a strong leukemogen,” he argued on many occasions (p. 113)—yet he is recognized by other hematologists for having established the relationship between the two.

Since this book is a memoir...