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31AvignetteofdiscoveryNancy FlournoyDepartment of StatisticsUniversity of Missouri, Columbia, MOThis story illustrates the power of statistics as a learning tool. Through aninterplay of exploration and carefully designed experiments, each with theirspecific findings, an important discovery is made. Set in the 1970s and 80s,procedures implemented with the best intentions were found to be deadly.Before these studies, only hepatitis was known to be transmitted through contaminatedblood products. We discovered that the cytomegalovirus could betransferred through contaminated blood products and developed novel bloodscreening techniques to detect this virus just before it become well known forits lethality among persons with AIDS. We conclude with some commentsregarding the design of experiments in clinical trials.31.1 IntroductionToday blood banks have institutionalized sophisticated procedures for protectingthe purity of blood products. The need for viral screening proceduresare now taken for granted, but 40 years ago transmission of viral infectionsthrough the blood was understood only for hepatitis. Here I review the genesisof a hypothesis that highly lethal cytomegalovirus (CMV) pneumonia couldresult from contaminated blood products and the experiments that were conductedto test this hypothesis. The question of cytomegalovirus infection resultingfrom contaminated blood products arose in the early days of bonemarrow transplantation. So I begin by describing this environment and howthe question came to be asked.E. Donnell Thomas began to transplant bone marrow into patients fromdonors who were not their identical twins in 1969. By 1975, his Seattle transplantteam had transplanted 100 patients with acute leukemia (Thomas et al.,1977). Bone marrow transplantation is now a common treatment for childhoodleukemia with a good success rate for young people with a well-matched donor.349