Reflecting on Donald Pinkel’s legacy as a physician, scientist, and humanitarian

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Dr. Donald Pinkel, my father, was a pioneering pediatric oncologist who developed the first curative drug treatment for acute lymphoblastic leukemia (ALL) in children. This work has led to a vastly improved survival rate for ALL patients throughout the world. 

Pinkel in 2001
All photos courtesy of the Pinkel family

Dr. Pinkel, who died March 9 at age 95, was also a leader in improving the public health and nutrition of children. While serving as the director of St. Jude Children’s Research Hospital in Memphis, he collaborated with community leaders to develop and prove the efficacy of a public-health initiative that later came to be known as the Special Supplemental Food Program for Women, Infants and Children, known today as WIC. 

He was  a strong advocate for social justice. When he came to St. Jude as its founding director in 1961, he discovered that the architecture plans provided for separate bathrooms and dining rooms for Blacks and Whites. He directed the young architect assigned to the project to redesign the first floor so that there would not be separate bathroom and dining facilities. He also insisted that Black employees receive equal wages, flying in the face of local custom at that time. While he was director, St. Jude also played a role in the integration of hotels in Memphis. When one hotel refused to allow Black patients and their parents to check in, he issued an ultimatum. If Black families could not stay in the hotel, St. Jude would send no patient families there. The hotel agreed to change the policy, provided that Black families eat in their rooms instead of the dining room. Again, Dr. Pinkel held firm, and hotel management relented. 

The fourth of seven children, Dr. Pinkel was born in Buffalo, NY, in 1926, to Anne Richardson and Lawrence Pinkel. Sister Eileen Pinkel of Hamburg, NY, is his only surviving sibling. His other siblings—Catherine Jacobi, Anna Marie McCarthy, Loretto Kelsey, Lawrence Pinkel, and Thomas Pinkel—are deceased. He attended St. Paul’s Grammar School in Kenmore and Canisius High School in Buffalo. 

Eager to experience the world, he joined the Navy at age 17, hoping to serve his country, but instead received orders to enter the officer training program at Cornell University. After the war, his naval scholarship at Cornell ended and he returned to Buffalo to complete his undergraduate education at Canisius College. In later years, he talked about how his year at Cornell—with its international student body and emphasis on inclusiveness and intellectual freedom—had a profound effect on his approach to life and to medicine. 

Pinkel and Marita Donovan on their wedding day in Buffalo, NY, on Dec. 26, 1949. 

Dr. Pinkel married Marita Donovan, also a Buffalo native, in 1949 and graduated from the University of Buffalo School of Medicine in 1951. The couple had nine children together: Rebecca Amthor, Nancy Pinkel, Christopher Pinkel (deceased), Mary Pinkel, Thomas Pinkel, Noelle Greene, Dr. Sara Pinkel, John Pinkel, and Ruth Pinkel. Marita supported his recovery from polio and his commitment to pediatric oncology and public health. 

She also shared his commitment to social justice. The couple marched with many of their children in Memphis—while he was CEO and director of St. Jude’s—after Martin Luther King was murdered there in 1968. The couple divorced in 1981, and Dr. Pinkel married Dr. Cathyrn Howarth in 1982. They had one son, Michael Pinkel. 

As a medical student and later as a resident at Buffalo Children’s Hospital, Dr. Pinkel was profoundly affected by the devastation that childhood cancer wreaked on families and disturbed by the medical profession’s defeatist attitude towards the disease. He resolved to devote his career to pediatric cancer research, accepting a fellowship at Sloan-Kettering, in New York, after his residency. His plans were changed when he was called to serve as a doctor in the U.S. Army in 1954, during the Korean War. He became afflicted with the polio virus during a polio epidemic in New England in September 1954 while serving as the pediatrician at Fort Devens Army Base in Massachusetts. After months of hospitalization, he was offered a fellowship at Harvard, with Dr. Sidney Farber. Dr. Farber was a mentor and supporter not only of Pinkel’s research, but of his efforts to recover from polio. 

When he came to St. Jude as its founding director in 1961, he discovered that the architecture plans provided for separate bathrooms and dining rooms for Blacks and Whites. He directed the young architect assigned to the project to redesign the first floor so that there would not be separate bathroom and dining facilities. 

In 1956, Dr. Pinkel was selected to start the first pediatric cancer department at the Roswell Park Cancer Institute in Buffalo. By the spring of 1961, however, his physicians advised him to move to a more moderate climate to further his recovery. He accepted an interview for the position as director of St. Jude Children’s Research Hospital, an under-funded hospital in downtown Memphis founded by the entertainer Danny Thomas that was still in the early phases of construction. Curious about the South and the civil rights movement, Pinkel flew to Memphis for an interview. 

Impressed by the idea that St. Jude would accept patients of all races and would not charge for its services, Pinkel accepted the position in July 1961, and, with the help of an excellent staff, Thomas’s fundraising efforts, and grants from the National Cancer Institute, transformed the underfunded and fledgling St. Jude  from a mere construction site into a world class medical institution. Dr. Pinkel would be forever grateful to the NCI leadership for its support of St. Jude’s efforts to find a cure for childhood leukemia. He would later recall that Dr. Kenny Endicott referred to the hospital as “a star in the Southern sky.” 

Pinkel in 1954, a few months after contracting polio, with his son Christopher (deceased), and daughters Rebecca and Nancy. The arm of his wheelchair is visible in the bottom left corner. 
The Pinkel family outside their home in Memphis in 1967

Dr. Pinkel’s efforts to combat malnutrition and poverty were not always well-received by the city’s white leadership. On one occasion, he received a call from the mayor, who complained that he was “giving Memphis a bad name.”  On another occasion, he was told that St. Jude donors in Arkansas were unhappy with his social activism. Dr. Pinkel resigned as director in 1973, intending to stay on as a research clinician. However, he accepted a position as chief of pediatrics in Milwaukee in 1974.

Dr. Pinkel started the Midwest Cancer Center at Milwaukee Children’s Hospital during his tenure there. He went on to serve as director of the Familian Children’s Hospital at the City of Hope Hospital/Medical Center in Duarte, California, chief of pediatrics at St. Christopher’s Hospital in Philadelphia, and as a clinician at the M.D. Anderson Cancer Center in Houston. In his later years, he served on the faculty of California Polytechnic Institute in San Luis Obispo, California. 

Dr. Pinkel’s achievements include the Mary Lasker Award (1972); the Kettering Prize (1986); the Pollin Prize (2003) and recognition as a giant of Cancer Care (2019). In 2017 St. Jude named the Donald Pinkel Research Tower in his honor. 

Although he devoted much of his life to his work, Dr. Pinkel enjoyed sailing on the Great Lakes and in the Gulf of Mexico with his children, taking his family to the theater and to the symphony, and participating in family reunions on the Central Coast of California. He derived great joy from visits with his children and grandchildren.

In his final years, he spoke with immense pride of the time he spent in Memphis as the director of St. Jude. St. Jude gave him the opportunity to develop a research hospital that excelled in clinical care and scientific research, and which welcomed all children regardless of their family incomes and ethnicity. He was proud of his inner circle, known as “the St. Jude Mafia,” which worked together as a team to cure children of ALL and other childhood diseases.

Pinkel with his daughter Mary Pinkel

Although he would hold prestigious positions at other institutions, he felt his most important work was accomplished at St. Jude. After Danny Thomas’s funeral in Memphis in 1991, he wrote his children an emotional letter, describing his strong bond to Thomas and Edward Barry, the first chairperson of the St. Jude board, and his gratitude for the support of the family during the Memphis years. He was happily surprised when one recent family reunion in Avila Beach, CA, featured Memphis music, landmarks, and cuisine. 

In addition to his nine surviving children, Dr. Pinkel leaves sixteen grandchildren, five great-grandchildren, many nieces, and nephews, and his second wife, Cathryn Howarth. 


Mary Pinkel, attorney, writer, and daughter of Donald Pinkel

Mary Pinkel
Attorney, writer
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Researchers at Baylor College of Medicine and Texas Children’s Cancer Center were awarded more than $7.6 million over four years from NCI to comprehensively study late effects of childhood cancer in a diverse population of childhood cancer survivors, including their medical, neurocognitive, and psychosocial outcomes. In addition, they will evaluate potential educational and sociodemographic barriers to obtaining survivorship care.
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