Rebecca Buckley
Rebecca Buckley was born in 1933 in Hamlet, North Carolina. She graduated with an AB from Duke University in 1954 and an MD from the University of North Carolina School of Medicine in 1958. She completed Residency training in Pediatrics and Fellowship training in Allergy and Immunology at Duke. She later became a faculty member in the Department of Pediatrics at Duke University Medical Center and was the Chief of the Division of Allergy and Immunology from 1974 to 2003. She had been Professor of Immunology at Duke from 1979 until she retired in 2022 after 64 years of service.
Dr. Buckley has studied and maintained a remarkable success rate with a surgical technique for babies with severe combined immunodeficiency (SCID) or “bubble boy disease,” which enables significant numbers of SCID babies to develop normal immune systems through the removal of T-cells from donor bone marrow. Her longterm advocacy for newborn screening for SCID has resulted in it being added to the Recommended Universal Screening Panel (RUSP), which identifies a number of core conditions for which screening is highly recommended.
In 1979, she was the first female to receive the James Buren Sidbury Professor of Pediatrics, a distinguished professorship in the Duke School of Medicine. She has received many awards in addition to this honor, including the William G. Anlyan Lifetime Achievement Award from the Duke Medical Alumni Association in 2006, Lifetime Achievement Award in Genetics from the American College of Medical Genetics in 2014 and recognition on the 2019-2020 Best Doctors List.
Among her many activities, Dr. Buckley has written extensively, served on numerous national committees and councils, trained more than 80 postdoctoral fellows, served two terms as a Director of the American Board of Allergy and Immunology, been elected to the Institute of Medicine of the National Academy of Sciences, been inducted into the National Academy of Sciences, and chaired the NIH Immunological Sciences Study Section.
Interview
This oral history interview was conducted with Dr. Rebecca Buckley on February 19, 2007 by Jessica Roseberry.