Thomas C. Hall, MD, an AACR member for more than 59 years, died in September 2014, at the age of 93. Hall served on the AACR board of directors from 1972 to 1975.
Born Nov. 26, 1921, in the Bronx, New York, Hall attended Harvard College, although World War II interrupted his schooling. As a practicing Quaker and pacifist, Hall, rather than serving in the military, served an 18-month federal prison term, during which he worked in the hospital as an orderly. This experience sparked his interest in medicine, and Hall received his medical degree in 1949 from Harvard Medical School in Boston.
He spent his career as a researcher, teacher, and practicing oncologist throughout the country and in Canada at institutes including Harvard Medical School; Dana-Farber Cancer Center in Boston; the University of Rochester in New York; the University of Southern California; and the University of British Columbia in Vancouver, Canada. He retired to Bellingham, Washington, where he was part of a National Cancer Institute prostate cancer prevention trial and worked as a medical oncologist.
Hall joined the AACR in 1955.
Prof. Hall came to the LAC/USC-MC in 1973 as the Medical Oncology Director, with his Rochester chemo manuals and lab protocols for study of 5-FU and methotrexate. He championed 5-AzaC as a novel agent, and Ara-C by continuous infusion. His lead brightened the USC campus newly designated a Comprehensive CC. He effected the transition well, helping recruit Prof. Heidelberger in 1976, on his move to Hawaii before relocation to Vancouver BC. He contributed seminal chemotherapy articles to NEJM, created the field of paraneoplasia, founded Med.Ped.Oncol., and so much more. We give profound thanks on this, the 100th anniversary of his birth, to his brilliance, vision, and dedication.