Dr. Joseph E. Murray, who performed the world’s first successful kidney
transplant and won a Nobel Prize for his pioneering work, has died at
age 93.
Murray’s death in Boston was confirmed on Monday by Brigham and Women’s
Hospital spokesman Tom Langford. No cause of death was immediately
announced.
Since the first kidney transplants on identical twins, hundreds of
thousands of transplants on a variety of organs have been performed
worldwide. Murray shared the Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine in
1990 with Dr. E. Donnall Thomas, who won for his work in bone marrow
transplants.
“Kidney transplants seem so routine now,” Murray told The New York Times
after he won the Nobel. “But the first one was like Lindbergh’s flight
across the ocean.”
Murray’s breakthroughs did not come without criticism, from ethicists
and religious leaders. Some people “felt that we were playing God and
that we shouldn’t be doing all of these, quote, experiments on human
beings,” he told The Associated Press in a 2004 interview in which he
also spoke out in favour of stem cell research.
In the early 1950s, there had never been a successful human organ
transplant. Murray and his associates at Boston’s Peter Bent Brigham
Hospital, now Brigham and Women’s Hospital, developed new surgical
techniques, gaining knowledge by successfully transplanting kidneys on
dogs. In December 1954, they found the right patients, 23-year-old
Richard Herrick, who had end-stage kidney failure, and his identical
twin, Ronald Herrick.
Because of their identical genetic background, they did not face the
biggest problem with transplant patients, the immune system’s rejection
of foreign tissue.
After the operation, Richard had a functioning kidney transplanted from
Ronald. Richard lived another eight years, marrying a nurse he met at
the hospital and having two children.
“Post-operatively the transplanted kidney functioned immediately with a
dramatic improvement in the patient’s renal and cardiopulmonary status,”
Murray said in his Nobel lecture. “This spectacular success was a clear
demonstration that organ transplantation could be life-saving.”
Murray performed more transplants on identical twins over the next few
years and tried kidney transplants on other relatives, including
fraternal twins, learning more about how to suppress the immune system’s
rejection of foreign tissue. One patient who received a kidney
transplant from a fraternal twin in 1959, plus radiation and a bone
marrow transplant to suppress his immune response, lived for 29 more
years.
But it was the development of drugs to suppress the body’s immune
response, a less radical approach than radiation, that made real
breakthroughs in transplants possible. In 1962, Murray and his team
successfully completed the first organ transplant from an unrelated
donor. The 23-year-old patient, Mel Doucette, received a kidney from a
man who had died.
Murray continued a long career in plastic surgery, his original
specialty, and transplants. He was guided by his own deep religious
convictions.
“Work is a prayer,” he told the Harvard University Gazette in 2001. “And
I start off every morning dedicating it to our Creator.”
