Alumni
Profiles of Success
Lawrence T. Goodnough M.D.
Professor of Medicine and Pathology & Immunology
Washington University
B.S. Biology 1971, Purdue
It has become common place for surgery patients concerned about the safety of blood to pre-donate their own. Dr. Lawrence T. Goodnough helped to popularize this procedure and is now considered an international leader in transfusion medicine. He entered the field at the beginning of the AIDS era, when concern about HIV in the blood supply was growing. Transfusion medicine became a priority of the National Institutes of Health, and Dr. Goodnough received one of 30 grants given to up-and-coming clinicians in 1985. In 1987 he became the associate director of University Hospitals of Cleveland Blood Bank. He has been at the forefront of transfusion medicine ever since.
Currently Dr. Goodnough is on the faculty at the Washington University School of Medicine, a research-intensive medical center in St. Louis where he has worked since 1992. Because blood is vital to many medical procedures, his work spans a range of areas within the hospitals. He is a professor of medicine and pathology & immunology and also has academic appointments in laboratory medicine and oncology. He coordinates the blood transfusion and blood conservation programs as Director of Transfusion Services at Barnes-Jewish Hopsital. He also serves as Medical Director of the Donor/Aphresis Unit and the Cryopreservation Lab, where blood components and peripheral blood stem cells are collected, inventoried, and dispensed for transfusion and transplantation. In addition, he serves as attending physician for patients on the Leukemia and Stem Cell Transplantation Unit.
Among Dr. Goodnough's current research interests are bloodless surgeries and blood alternatives. He has come to question the pre-donation procedure he helped to popularize as unnecessarily costly considering the increased safety of donor blood. It is also risky to patients who may become anemic prior to surgery. Another reason for minimizing blood transfusions is the anticipation that donation rates will not keep pace with the increasing demand for blood as the nation ages. To address these serious issues, Dr. Goodnough is investigating strategies for eliminating transfusions altogether. One of the methods he is testing is using the drug recombinant human erythropoietin, or EPO. It was developed to treat anemia but is also used illegally by endurance athletes like cyclists to increase performance. For surgery patients it can increase the production of red blood cells in a patient's body before surgery and thus prevent the need for transfusions. In addition, Dr. Goodnough is involved in clinical trials of "blood substitutes," which can carry oxygen and temporarily make up for lost blood.
Dr. Goodnough's start in medicine was much humbler than his accomplishments might suggest. His first medical job was as an orderly in his hometown of Dayton, Ohio. For anyone considering a career in medicine, he recommends working or volunteering in a health care setting. "I worked my way through Purdue as an orderly, and learned first-hand the hour-by-hour experience of people who are sick and in the hospital. It's a great way to develop people skills and learn how to work with everyone involved in healthcare." Of course, technical skills are also important for practicing medicine. Dr. Goodnough credits Purdue with giving him the scientific tools he needed to achieve success in his field, not simply by training him in biology, but "by teaching me how to learn." Within the Purdue faculty he found "important role models for scientific rigor and the pursuit of truth" in Dr. Doctor in Ecology and Dr. Klinghammer in Ethology (animal behavior), who is now the director of the Wolf Park in Battle Ground, Indiana. To anyone considering majoring in Biology, he highly recommends the book, Love, Time, Memory by Jonathan Weiner. It tells the story of Seymour Benzer, a former Purdue professor and arguably the pre-eminent biologist of the 20 th century. "It made me fall in love with Biology all over again," Goodnough said.