Donald Morton

Donald Lee Morton was an American oncologist who was best known for developing sentinel lymph node evaluation, a procedure that, by some estimates, saves the U.S. healthcare system nearlybillion annually in the treatment of melanoma and breast cancer. At the time of his death, he was Chief of the Melanoma Program at the John Wayne Cancer Institute in Santa Monica, California. He published in excess of 600 articles in peer reviewed journals and received funding for his research from the National Institutes of Health foryears. As Director of the John Wayne Cancer Institutes Surgical Oncology Fellowship Program, Dr. Morton trained more than 100 postdoctoral fellows, most of whom hold academic positions in medical schools or cancer institutes.

Morton was born and raised in Richwood, West Virginia, the son of a coal miner. He grew up during the Great Depression in a home without running water or electricity. Due to his economically disadvantaged status, he was able to attend Berea College in Kentucky on a full scholarship. He ended up moving to California where he completed his undergraduate studies at the University of California, Berkeley in 1955. He then went on to earn a medical degree from the University of California, San Francisco in 1958. In 1960, he became a researcher at the National Cancer Institute, part of the National Institutes of Health in Bethesda, Maryland. He later returned to California and joined the faculty at UCLA, where he became Chief of Surgical Oncology in 1971. While at UCLA, he treated the actor John Wayne, who died of gastric cancer in 1979.

Source: Wikipedia