Stem cell transplants in TV and movies
When we talk to people about stem cell transplants, we often hear something like this:
“Isn’t that supposed to be really painful?”
And we think we know who the culprit is…
Many TV shows and movies portray stem cell donation as being extremely traumatic – a total myth!
Admittedly, all medical dramas need to use a bit of artistic license for the sake of entertainment – meaning we often see things like doctors doing jobs that only nurses are trained in, surgeons performing a vast repertoire of procedures without supervision, and wildly inappropriate bedside manners…
But a lot of the time, they also struggle to reflect the reality of stem cell transplants. So we’ve collected examples of The Good, The Bad, and The Ugly of stem cell transplants in TV and movies to help you separate fact from fiction.
The Good
Grey’s Anatomy is one of the biggest medical dramas out there, and stem cell transplants feature as storylines several times – with varying degrees of accuracy. One example of a time they get it right on Grey’s is the character Braden Morris, who appears across several episodes due to his extended treatment.
He is a child with SCID (severe combined immunodeficiency), an immune disorder that is often treated with a stem cell transplant – however, in the show, he is told that there is not an available match for him on the donor registry, partially related to his ethnicity. It’s true that patients from minority ethnic backgrounds can be less likely to find a fully matched unrelated donor, due to the rarities of particular tissue types among different global populations.
In the show, Braden doesn’t receive a transplant, instead receiving an experimental gene therapy – but the fact that the issue of equity in stem cell transplants was brought up is highly reflective of many patients’ experiences, and highlights a major issue that Anthony Nolan and other stem cell transplant organisations are working to address.
If you’re a soap fan, you may have caught the recent storyline on Coronation Street where baby Frankie was diagnosed with aplastic anaemia, and his family were told he may need a stem cell transplant. For this story, Anthony Nolan worked together with the team at Coronation Street to help the writers accurately reflect the experience of patients, donors and families. While the story is still ongoing, we expect Frankie may be searching for a donor soon. So far the story is an accurate portrayal of many patients’ and families’ experiences, and we’ll be following it closely!
Before baby Frankie’s Coronation Street storyline, Emmerdale also ran a story about aplastic anaemia. In 2023, Gail’s son Oscar was diagnosed with aplastic anaemia, and his doctors started looking for a donor. Parents are effectively always a half match (technically a ‘haplo’ match) for their children, which can be a good transplant option in many cases – but in this story, while Gail was a match for her child, the father Ryan was not. We’re not told the reason why, so we can assume the transplant team may have chosen Gail over Ryan for reasons such as a matching blood type or CMV status. It is pretty unlikely that Ryan was not a haplo match for his child, except in the case of some rare genetic events.
While this story could have included a bit more information about why Ryan was not a match, it was still good to see aplastic anaemia being represented on TV, together with (spoilers!) a successful stem cell transplant.
The Bad
We return to Grey’s Anatomy, this time falling into the most common TV trope about stem cell donation – the myth that it’s a highly painful procedure. Hollywood still hasn’t caught up to reality: even though 90% of stem cell donations these days are collected from the bloodstream, involving a few hours comfortably sitting in a hospital bed, the vast majority of donations we see on TV are done through bone marrow. What’s more, the process is often dramatised as a painful or traumatic procedure, when in reality it is performed under general anaesthetic and donors typically only experience soreness and discomfort after the procedure.
In an episode of Grey’s, resident doctor Izzie discovers she has a child who needs a stem cell transplant. Her child had an unrelated donor lined up, but that donor passed away before the transplant. Izzie decides to donate to her child, but here the show commits the sin of depicting a bone marrow donation completely inaccurately – portraying it as a painful procedure done without the benefit of a general anaesthetic.
My Sister’s Keeper is a novel by Jodi Picoult, adapted into a film in 2009 starring Cameron Diaz. It’s one of many examples of TV shows and movies that cover the topic of ‘saviour siblings,’ who are conceived to be a provider of organs or blood products for their ill older sibling(s).
While saviour siblings are real, the details of the cases are often exaggerated in fiction. In this film, reality is stretched significantly when it comes to stem cell donation. The older sibling is given a cord blood transplant and two bone marrow transplants from her saviour sibling, which not many haematologists would be comfortable with – the first failed cord blood transplant indicates she was not an ideal donor.
The film also suggests that there is a 1 in 200 chance of a parent being a full match for their child. This may be the case in very insular communities and in the case of rare genetic events, but in the UK we’d expect this to be much less likely. Almost all the time, parents are a haplo match for their children.
Saviour siblings are also depicted providing stem cell transplants in episodes of Grey’s Anatomy (S10E5) and Private Practice (S2E1) to name just a couple – but you’ll see this kind of storyline everywhere just because it’s so dramatic.
The Ugly
House M.D., while sometimes very entertaining, is a medical show that is guilty of major inaccuracies in pretty much every episode. It’s no surprise that they got stem cell transplants wrong on more than one occasion.
The most harmful example is an episode where a sibling is just about to donate to his older brother, when he comes down with a mysterious infection. The medical team must figure out what the infection is and treat it before the donation can go ahead. However in the meantime, the family decide to instead use an unrelated donor who is a 4/6 match. Unfortunately, the older sibling suffers from severe graft versus host disease (GvHD) following this transplant, leaving him in a critical condition.
The team then discover the cause of the younger sibling’s infection, and begin to treat it. However he will not be fully treated in time to donate. One of the doctors disobeys the orders of his boss and forces the young sibling (who is only ten years old) into donating his bone marrow, despite not being fully treated, hoping that the infection will be gone in time for the transplant. The doctor tells the boy he must carry out this procedure without anaesthetic due to his weakened state – medically complete nonsense as the risk of shock would be higher than the risk of anaesthetic or sedation – and we see the doctor stab a large needle into the boys’ femur, ignoring his pleas.
This episode gets a few things wrong about stem cell transplants, including how GvHD typically presents and the possibility of performing a second transplant immediately following the first. However it does the most harm in the way it portrays a bone marrow donation. In fact, the show depicts an assault rather than a medical procedure, and it could have achieved a necessary level of drama without resorting to putting people off the idea of donating.
Desperate Measures is a 1998 film starring Michael Keaton, involving a police officer whose son requires a stem cell transplant, but has no matching donor. Naturally, the father breaks into the computer banks of the FBI where he discovers his son has a matching donor locked up in a high-security prison – the idea here is that the FBI have been performing secret tissue typing of US prisoners for decades! In a review of this film, haematologist Dr Patrick Medd quips: “Whether the NMDP [the US stem cell register] have known about this all along and have just been keeping quiet about it probably merits further investigation…”
Needless to say, the film involves a lot of gunfights and hostage-taking, but eventually our main character manages to free the prisoner and gets him to donate stem cells to his son. I think Dr Medd sums it up best: “A joyful lesson in what can be achieved in stem cell transplantation through the combined application of willpower and firepower.”
Share your bests and worsts
We’ve got plenty more examples to cover, so we’ll be back with another edition of The Good, The Bad, and The Ugly soon… In the meantime, have you seen a stem cell transplant in a TV show or movie that we’ve missed out? Let us know!
Where to learn more about stem cell donation
Our website has many resources on stem cell donation, and our donor services team can answer any of your questions – you can contact them here: register.support@anthonynolan.org
Become a potential lifesaver by joining the stem cell register – it only takes a few minutes! Complete a quick form and we’ll send you a cheek swab in the post. You could be the match a patient somewhere in the world is waiting for.
Reviewed for accuracy by senior medical officer Dr Tania Dexter. Thanks to the clinical laboratories team for their help with communicating the genetic complexities of stem cell transplants.