Despite substantial progress in curative therapy of malignant lymphomas, some patients fail current treatment and die of refractory disease. Although Although high-dose chemotherapy and supralethal total body irradiation followed by bone marrow transplantation may salvage and cure a proportion of these refractory patients, treatment of such end-stage patients with marrow grafting often fails because of resistant disease or transplant-related complications. Using the analogy of transplantation in the early phases of acute and chronic leukemias, results of marrow transplant in Hodgkin's disease and non-Hodgkin's lymphoma might be improved if performed earlier in the course of the malignancy. The following collaborative report by the Seattle and Stanford groups examines current results of conventional lymphoma therapy to define subgroups of patients with "high-risk" lymphoma for whom early marrow transplant might be offered to control otherwise incurable disease.