Two UW faculty honored with Medal of Merit

Jacob Lawrence

Two UW faculty members—artist Jacob Lawrence and cancer researcher Dr. E. Donnall Thomas—last week received the highest honor awarded in the state, the Medal of Merit.

They were among four recipients who were honored during a special joint session of the Legislature Wednesday, Feb. 18. "These awards honor the best that is in each of us and challenge us all to reach for the greatness that today's Medal of Merit recipients have achieved," said Gov. Locke at the award ceremony. Only 14 Washingtonians have been honored with the prestigious Medal of Merit since it was created by the Legislature in 1986. The medal was last given in 1995.

Thomas, a 1990 recipient of the Nobel Prize for Medicine, helped develop and perfect the bone marrow transplantation procedure that now saves thousands of lives. He shares the Nobel Prize with Joseph E. Murray of Boston's Brigham and Women's Hospital. In 1956, Thomas was the first to show that bone marrow could be safely infused into a human patient. He was the first to treat acute leukemia patients with marrow transplantation.

Dr. E. Donnall Thomas

In 1963, Thomas organized and led the division of oncology at the UW School of Medicine. He directed the world's largest marrow transplant program at the Fred Hutchinson Cancer Research Center for 15 years. He is a member of the National Academy of Sciences, is one of seven scientists in the world to receive the 1990 Gairdner Foundation International Award for contributions in medicine, wrote an acclaimed textbook and has won numerous other awards.

Lawrence is a painter and UW professor emeritus whose work is collected and shown by major museums and corporations across the nation and around the world. He is known for chronicling the American experience in human, rather than heroic terms and for making the African-American experience accessible and understandable. He was appointed full professor at the UW in 1971 and taught until 1984.

Lawrence's work has been the subject of three major retrospectives since 1960 and has been exhibited in such prestigious museums as the National Gallery of Art, the Smithsonian Institution in Washington D.C., the Museum of Modern Art and the Whitney Museum of American Art in New York. He is known as a man with a strong sense of community and a modest sense of self. These beliefs have shaped the content of his work and the tenor of his teaching style. His numerous awards include the 1997 William O. Douglas Award from the American Civil Liberties Union and the National Medal of Arts from President George Bush.

Other medalists are Grady Auvil, who co-founded Auvil Fruit Company with his wife Lillie in 1928, and the late Stanley O. McNaughton, president and chief executive officer of PEMCO Financial Services for more than 30 years. ¶