Organ Transplant Pioneer Joseph Murray Dies

The doctor who won a Nobel Prize for performing the first ever successful organ transplant has died at the age of 93.

Dr Joseph Murray died on Monday after suffering a stroke last week, at the same Boston hospital where he performed the landmark kidney transplant on twins Ronald and Richard Herrick on December 23, 1954.

Dr Murray put his interest in the emerging science of transplants down to the three years he spent on the surgical ward of an army hospital in Pennsylvania during the Second World War.

Surgeons there would often treat severely burned soldiers with skin grafts from dead bodies as a temporary measure.

"The slow rejection of the foreign skin grafts fascinated me. How could the host distinguish another person's skin from his own?" Dr Murray would later write in an autobiographical essay published by the Nobel committee.

Dr Murray learned that the chief plastic surgeon, Colonel James Brown, had earlier carried out a skin graft on identical twins in which the recipient's body had accepted the foreign tissue rather than instinctively attacking it.

"This was the impetus to my study of organ transplantation," he later wrote.

The prospect of transplanting organs from one living patient to another was controversial from the beginning, with critics viewing it as a violation of nature that endangered both the donor and the recipient.

But the public started coming around to the procedure after Dr Murray's historic operation in 1954, when he transplanted a kidney from Ronald Herrick to his identical twin brother Richard, extending his life by eight years.

In those eight years, Richard Herrick married his post-operative nurse, had two children and toasted his brother for "the extra drink". His twin died in 2010.

Dr Murray helped to develop the drug Imuran in the 1960s, which suppressed the immune system to allow patients to accept transplants from unrelated donors.

He won the Nobel Prize in Medicine in 1990, sharing the honour with E Donnall Thomas, who pioneered bone marrow transplants; their discoveries have been used to cure or provide a decent life for tens of thousands of severely ill patients.

Dr Murray later focused on plastic surgery, specifically the repair of facial defects in children.

"My life as a surgeon-scientist, combining humanity and science, has been fantastically rewarding," he wrote in the Nobel essay.

"In our daily patients we witness human nature in the raw - fear, despair, courage, understanding, hope, resignation, heroism. If alert, we can detect new problems to solve, new paths to investigate."

The doctor is survived by his wife, three sons, three daughters and 18 grandchildren.