1. Visiting Professor of Hematology, Hematology Research Centre, Division of Experimental Medicine, Department of Medicine, Imperial College London, London, UK
2. Professor of Medicine, University of Toronto, Director Cell Therapy Program, University Health Network.
John M. Goldman, emeritus professor at Imperial College London, was a leader in studies of leukemia for the last 40 years. He focused on chronic myeloid leukemia (CML), an invariably fatal disease when he began his research in 1971.
John was born in 1938, was educated at Westminster School where he was a superior student, and sang in the choir that performed at the coronation of Queen Elizabeth II. He studied medicine at Magdalene College, Oxford, where he was also a classics scholar, and he completed his medical training at St. Bartholomew Hospital, London. He then moved to the University of Miami and later to Harvard University.
In 1971, John joined the renowned department of hematology at Hammersmith Hospital, which included Sir John Dacie, Sir David Galton, Professor Victor Hoffbrand, and Professor Daniel Catovsky, among others. There he focused on CML where he pioneered the use of bone marrow transplantation and helped establish the Anthony Nolan Trust Donor Registry, which now includes more than 500,000 volunteers and is used to find donors for recipients in the United Kingdom and worldwide.
In the 1990s, John promoted promising preclinical research, conducted by Dr. Brian Druker, using imatinib to treat CML. Despite working miraculously, no drug company was interested in developing the drug. Much like the story of Florey and Chain who developed penicillin, but had to travel to the United States to find a drug company willing to produce it, Goldman flew to Basel, Switzerland, to persuade Novartis to produce imatinib. He succeeded, and imatinib and successor drugs are now given to thousands of people worldwide.
John was a founder and served as president of several professional organizations that promoted research and collaboration in blood disorders and transplantation, including the European Hematology Association and the European Bone Marrow Transplant Group. From 1998 to 2002, John was chair of the Center for International Blood and Marrow Transplant Research. He also created LEUKA, a charity to raise money to fund leukemia research, and founded the widely read journal Bone Marrow Transplantation.
Following his retirement from Hammersmith Hospital in 2004, John focused on global health issues. He developed the International CML Foundation with Professors Timothy Hughes and Jorge Cortes to make innovations in leukemia diagnosis and therapy available worldwide. In 2005, he was also a Fogarty Scholar at the National Institutes of Health with Professor John Barrett. Most recently, he was campaigning to reduce cancer drug prices so people in developing countries could receive advanced therapies.
Among his professional colleagues, John was considered the leader in his field. He published more than 700 scientific papers and many books and coordinated an international community of leukemia researchers, fostering a climate of openness, collaboration, and free intellectual exchange. John also mentored a generation of leukemia specialists who now head hematology departments across the United Kingdom and the world.
John was a skilled physician with legendary devotion to his patients. He was regularly found in the early morning hours reading medical charts and reassuring sleepless patients. His American medical colleagues thought nothing of calling John at 1:00 a.m. London time to discuss an idea or complex medical case; no one is certain when (or if) he ever slept.
A gentleman, scholar, and statesman, John was known by his colleagues and friends for his erudition, sense of irony, generosity, and modesty. In his spare time, he enjoyed reading Saki, Wilde, Shakespeare, Greek mythology, and histories of the Napoleonic wars. He also loved skiing, spoke perfect French and passable Russian and Spanish, and traveled extensively. He once drove from London to India with a group of his Oxford classmates. When their party was briefly imprisoned by Iranian authorities, they escaped by drugging their guards with barbiturates. John also tried to solve the problem of the Elgin Marbles by suggesting a duplicate set be made and that each side in the controversy alternately choose the piece they wanted until two full sets were assembled. No one has come up with a better solution, so the quandary remains. Apparently, this is a trickier problem than curing CML.
John was invariably polite to colleagues, friends, and acquaintances, perhaps to a fault. When people approached him with bizarre ideas or scientific hypothesis, he was always polite commenting: “That’s an interesting idea.” Afterward, he reminded senior colleagues of a quote from the first Duke of Wellington who, having been addressed by a passerby near Apsley House as: “Mr. Jones, I believe,” replied: “If you believe that Sir, you will believe anything.”
