Norwood Oakley Hill, M. D. was born in Dallas, Texas on January 13, 1936. He graduated from Woodrow Wilson High School in Dallas in 1953, Yale University with a major in chemistry in 1957, and Baylor College of Medicine in 1961. He had special training in virology through fellowship programs at Baylor. His specialty training in internal medicine was two years in the Baylor program at Jefferson Davis and Ben Taub hospitals in Houston. He then served two years in the United States Air Force at Randolph Air Force Base, Texas from 1963 to 1965. He served an additional two years of internal medicine residency in the University of Texas Southwestern Medical School program at Parkland Hospital in Dallas from 1965 to 1967. In August 1967, he joined the staff of the Wadley Research Institute and Blood Bank, a hematology specialty center in Dallas. He was appointed medical director of the Wadley Blood Bank in 1968, and President of the Wadley Institutes of Molecular Medicine in 1975, holding this post until 1990. He was actively involved in seeking and developing new drugs for the treatment of leukemia and cancer, including L-asparaginase, cisplatin, and interferon where he developed the first interferon production laboratory in the United States. His efforts to improve the safety of donated blood included research testing for the earliest implementation of safety tests for hepatitis B, human T-cell leukemia virus, and hepatitis C. He also originated the concept of lookback, a program to notify patients who may have been infected with AIDS, T-cell leukemia virus, or hepatitis C if their blood donor tested positive on a subsequent donation. Lookback became controversial within the medical community for many years. Reaction to lookback in Dallas led to a hostile takeover of Wadley Blood Bank engineered by medical officials associated with major hospitals, ending Dr. Hill's career in blood banking.