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1869
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Children's Hospital Boston opens as a 20-bed facility at 9 Rutland Street in Boston's South End.
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1891
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Children's establishes the nation's first laboratory for the modification and production of bacteria-free milk.
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1920
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Dr. William Ladd devises procedures for correcting various congenital defects such as intestinal malformations, launching the specialty of pediatric surgery.
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1922
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Dr. James Gamble analyzes the composition of body fluids and develops a method for intravenous feeding that saves the lives of thousands of infants at risk of dehydration from diarrhea.
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1932
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Dr. Louis Diamond characterizes Rh disease, in which a fetus's blood is incompatible with its mother's. Diamond later develops exchange transfusion to treat the disease.
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1938
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Dr. Robert Gross performs the world's first successful surgical procedure to correct a congenital cardiovascular defect, ushering in the era of modern pediatric cardiac surgery.
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1947
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Dr. Sidney Farber achieves the world's first successful remission of acute leukemia. He goes on to found the Dana-Farber Cancer Institute.
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1954
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Dr. John Enders and his colleagues win the Nobel Prize for successfully culturing the polio virus in 1949, making possible the development of the Salk and Sabin vaccines. Enders and his team went on to culture the measles virus.
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1971
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Dr. Judah Folkman publishes "Tumor angiogenesis: therapeutic implications" in the New England Journal of Medicine. It is the first paper to describe Folkman's theory that tumors recruit new blood vessels in order to grow.
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1978
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Dr. Stuart Orkin develops restriction endonuclease mapping to diagnose thalassemia in utero.
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1983
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Children's physicians report the first surgical correction of hypoplastic left heart syndrome, a defect in which an infant is born without a left ventricle. The procedure is the first to correct what previously had been a fatal condition.
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1985
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The Howard Hughes Medical Institute funds a major research program in molecular genetics, the first HHMI program at a pediatric hospital.
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1986
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Drs. Louis Kunkel and Stuart Orkin and their research teams develop the technique of positional cloning to identify the genes responsible for Duchenne muscular dystrophy and chronic granulomatous disease, respectively.
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1989
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Researchers in Neurology and Genetics discover that beta amyloid, a protein that accumulates in the brains of people with Alzheimer's disease, is toxic to neurons, indicating the possible cause of the degenerative disease.
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1990
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Dr. Joseph Murray, chief of Plastic Surgery emeritus, wins the Nobel Prize for his pioneering work in organ transplantation.
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1996
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Boston Combined Residency Program (BCRP) formed.
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1996
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Dr. Michael Greenberg discovers that mice lacking the transcription factor fosB have no nurturing instinct.
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1998
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Dr. Anthony Atala successfully transplants laboratory-grown bladders into dogs, a major advance in the growing field of tissue engineering.
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1999
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Dr. Todd Golub first uses gene expression microarrays to differentiate cancers.
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2000
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Dr. Frederick Alt finds that end-joining proteins maintain the stability of DNA, helping to prevent the chromosomal changes that precede cancer.
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2001
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Children's performs the world's first successful fetal repair of hypoplastic left heart syndrome in a 19-week-old fetus.
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2002
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Dr. Nader Rifai co-authors a landmark study showing that a simple and inexpensive blood test for C-reactive protein is a more powerful predictor of a person's risk of heart attack or stroke than LDL cholesterol.
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2003
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Drs. Heung Bae Kim and Tom Jaksic develop, test and successfully perform the world's first-ever serial transverse enteroplasty (STEP) procedure, a potential lifesaving surgical procedure for patients with short bowel syndrome.
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2004
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Children's surgeons perform New England's first multi-visceral organ transplant when an 11-month-old boy receives a stomach, pancreas, liver and small intestine from a single donor.
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2005
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Dr. Stephen Harrison and colleagues show how a key part of the human immunodeficiency virus (HIV) changes shape, triggering other changes that allow the AIDS virus to enter and infect cells.
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2006
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Dr. Michael Greenberg discovers a brain-specific microRNA that regulates the development of dendritic spines in the brain that contribute to synaptic development and plasticity.
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2006
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Dr. Scott Armstrong identifies self-renewal genes that turn a normal blood cell progenitor into a leukemic stem cell.
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2006
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Dr. David Pellman discovers a set of genes whose loss is only lethal in hyperdiploid cells and are therefore therapeutic targets in hyperdiploid cancer cells.
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2006
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Dr. Hannah Kinney links sudden infant death syndrome (SIDS) to abnormalities in the brainstem serotonin system, which regulates breathing, blood pressure, body heat and arousal.
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2007
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Charles Nelson proves that abandoned children do much better cognitively if moved from institutions to foster care.
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2007
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Dr. Len Zon discovers that prostaglandin E2 greatly stimulates the growth of blood and probably other tissue stem cells.
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2007
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Dr Morris White shows that blocking insulin receptor substrate-2 (IRS-2) signaling promotes healthy metabolism and considerably extends life span.
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2007
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Dr. Lois Smith finds that omega-3-polyunsaturated fatty acids reduce pathological retinal angiogenesis and are a potential therapy for retinopathy of prematurity.
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2008
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Dr. George Daley discovers how to reprogram human somatic cells to pleuripotent stem cells with defined transcription factors.
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2008
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Dr. Chris Walsh and his colleagues identify several genetic loci that cause autism.
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2008
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Dr. Rani George finds that activating mutations in the receptor tyrosine kinase ALK cause some cases of neuroblastoma.
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2008
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Drs Vijay Sankaran and Stuart Orkin discover that the fetal hemoglobin to adult hemoglobin switch is controlled by the BCL11A transcription factor. This solves a decades old problem in hematology and has important implications for the treatment of sickle cell disease and thalassemias.
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2008
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Dr. Zhi He observes that stimulation of the mTOR pathway greatly increases axon regeneration after CNS injury.
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2008
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Manton Center for Orphan Disease Research founded.
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2009
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Immune Disease Institute joins Children's Hospital Boston as the Program in Cellular and Molecular Medicine.
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2009
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Drs. George Daley and Richard Gregory show that the microRNA, Lin 28, plays an important role in germ cell development and cancer.
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2009
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Drs. Len Zon and George Daley discover that blood flow triggers development of hematopoietic stem cells.
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2011
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Drs. Luigi Notarangelo, Sung-Yun Pai and David Williams achieve the first successful treatment of severe combined immunodeficiency by gene therapy in the US.
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