A vision to change the future of children with cancer

Yesterday

Still only in his 30s, Dr Roger Hardisty – later to become Professor Hardisty – joined GOSH in 1958. Despite not having any formal training as a paediatrician, without patients directly under his care and without a specialist cancer ward, he made remarkable steps in understanding and treating leukaemia, as well as identifying various forms of the disease for the first time.

In his three decades at the hospital he was pivotal in reducing the devastating 100 per cent death rate for children with leukaemia to 70 per cent.

As always, brave patients and their families played a major role in this dramatic progress. In 1960, six-yearold Susan Eastwood died within two months of being diagnosed with leukaemia. This terrible loss inspired her family to launch what would become a highly influential fundraising appeal. It made the headlines by raising £3,000 in little over a year (about £50,000 in today’s money), and it was the first donation to the hospital from the Leukaemia Research Fund.

When posed with the question “Are we prepared to have a go at tackling leukaemia?” Dr Hardisty gave an emphatic “Yes!”, despite Gordon Piller, the fund’s founder, likening the problem to climbing Everest with little equipment or knowledge of how to get to the top. Out of this came the country’s first leukaemia research unit, based at GOSH and its partner the UCL Institute of Child Health. Led by Dr Hardisty, this unit began looking for the origins of the disease, testing new treatments against a background of near total fatality.

1958 Dr Hardisty joins the hospital, where he will become a driving force behind remarkable changes in children’s cancer care.

Dr Roger Hardisty.

1961 The UK’s first leukaemia research unit opens at Great Ormond Street Hospital.