The bond that connects Bill Rutherford to Fred Hutch Cancer Center is woven from equal parts loss and gratitude, pain and love. It crosses state lines and spans decades. And it grows a little stronger with every discovery made in a lab and every patient whose life is extended as a result.
Rutherford made his first gift to support research at Fred Hutch in June 1982 as a tribute to his youngest son, Eric.
Eric had died a month earlier at age 19, after two bone marrow transplants to treat the leukemia he’d lived with since he was 3. Today, when most children with leukemia survive and are functionally cured, an outcome like that might feel like a disappointment. For Rutherford, his wife, Judy, and their three other sons, it was a gift.
“We had him for almost 20 years,” Rutherford said. “There’s no way we could repay …everyone at Fred Hutch for the 10 [extra] years he lived because of them.”
Though they’ve certainly tried. The Rutherfords have continued to give annually over the last four and a half decades, supporting everything from leukemia research to Fred Hutch’s Patient and Family Assistance Fund.
After Rutherford retired, the size of those gifts increased substantially — made via qualified charitable distributions from an IRA — but the intent has always been the same: to ease the experience of the families who have followed his.
“I’ll always appreciate the people we met there and the people who went through this with us and the anguish and the love that we experienced,” Rutherford said. “So I’ll keep giving for people like that.”
For the decade between his first and second transplants, Eric lived life about as normally as could be expected. Despite not growing after the first one, he did his best to keep up with his three older brothers, refusing to be left out of anything. He was “super smart, just like his grandpa,” and lived long enough to graduate high school. The Rutherford family cherished every extra moment they got with him.
Then a new, hopeful chapter began for Rutherford, built on the selflessness that his parents instilled in him as a child. To this day, he still remembers that his father would carry a couple extra dollars to give to struggling veterans around town and that his mother was all too happy to pay and feed migrant workers who offered to help on the Rutherfords’ property.
So throughout Eric’s two stays in Seattle, Rutherford began planning to do what he could for Fred Hutch to show how grateful he was for the extra time he’d gained with his son, as well as the care, comfort, and love that his entire family felt from the staff and nurses like Judy Campbell and Mary Stevens.
“If it hadn’t been for them, we couldn’t have got through it,” Rutherford said. “They took us in like family and made sure everyone was taken care of.”
It started with that tribute gift in 1982 and grew as the years passed, inspired by the belief that things could always improve. And they have. Fueled by each $250 or $500 or five-figure gift the Rutherfords have made over the last 45 years, Fred Hutch has taken another ambitious step forward in developing innovative treatments for leukemia in all its forms.
Fred Hutch Giving Day Coming Soon!
On September 16, Fred Hutch Giving Day returns — celebrating our community and showing what’s possible when we unite with the Rutherfords to look beyond what’s possible today.
Every gift, at every level, helps move research and care forward. With a special matching gift opportunity, your generosity can go even further, accelerating world-changing work at Fred Hutch.
Give through September 16, and your gift can be matched, doubling your impact.
Rutherford acknowledges that Eric donated his body to research that would improve bone marrow transplantation (BMT) for other patients. Advances in BMT paved the way for a series of discoveries in immunotherapy, including Fred Hutch’s pioneering work on T-cell therapy, in which a patient’s immune cells are genetically engineered to recognize and kill leukemia cells.
Thanks to donors like the Rutherfords, the prognosis has improved for patients with leukemia of all ages. When Eric underwent his first BMT in 1973, his physicians at Fred Hutch gave him a 20% chance of surviving the procedure. Today — after decades of support from our community and dogged research by our scientists — the odds of living five years after the procedure are well over 90%.
Like his father’s generosity, Eric’s experiences in the early days of bone marrow transplantation have benefited numerous patients and families. Scientists have transformed the world’s understanding of leukemia, treatment options and the management of treatment effects. While bone marrow transplantation is still arduous for patients who undergo the procedure, as Rutherford noted, “it’s so much easier now than it was before.”
About our Heart of the Hutch series
Much of Fred Hutch’s lifesaving research is possible because of the generosity of its supporters, who continually use their creativity and resourcefulness to raise money for research to prevent and treat cancer and other diseases.
This series highlights just a few of the thousands of Fred Hutch supporters who are the Heart of the Hutch.
Matthew Halverson is a senior writer on the Philanthropy team at Fred Hutch Cancer Center who worked for two decades as an editor and writer at city and regional magazines, including Seattle Met. His byline has appeared in Conde Nast Traveler and Southwest Airlines magazine. Reach him at mhalver2@fredhutch.org.
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