October 11: Dr. Gale’s International Medical Relief

Robert Peter Gale, co-founder of the International Bone Marrow Registry and a pioneer in bone marrow transplantation, was born in New York on this date in 1945. Gale first gained international attention for helping the Soviet Union deal with the after-effects of the Chernobyl nuclear power plant disaster in 1986; he operated with bone marrow transplants on thirteen radiation-exposed victims and wrote Final Warning, a book about the dangers of nuclear weapons and nuclear power that was later made into a movie. In 1987, Gale was asked by the government of Brazil to coordinate medical relief efforts for the Goiania hospital radioactivity accident; in 1988, he was part of the U.S. medical emergency team sent in the aftermath of the earthquake in Armenia; in 1999, he was invited by Japan to help treat victims of the Tokaimura nuclear accident, and in 2011 he was again called to Japan to deal with medical consequences of the Fukushima nuclear accident. (Gale considered the radiation risks at Fukushima to be exaggerated.) Author of twenty books and more than eight hundred scientific articles, Gale has made important contributions to the basic understanding of immunity, leukemia, and transplant surgery. He is married to an Israeli and is active in several Jewish non-profits.

“This is a new era in medicine, global medicine in a nuclear age.” —Robert Peter Gale