Murray, Joseph Edward (1919-2012), was an American surgeon who performed the first successful human organ transplant. In 1954, Murray gave a man dying of kidney failure a healthy kidney from the man’s identical twin brother. In 1990, Murray shared the Nobel Prize in physiology or medicine with another American transplant pioneer, cancer specialist E. Donnall Thomas.
Murray was born on April 1, 1919, in Milford, Massachusetts. He graduated from College of the Holy Cross in 1940. He earned an M.D. degree from Harvard Medical School in 1943 and trained as a plastic surgeon. He served as a doctor in the United States Army from 1944 to 1947, during and after World War II. He became interested in transplants during his Army service, when he grafted skin onto wounded soldiers.
In 1951, Murray became chief plastic surgeon at Peter Bent Brigham Hospital (now Brigham and Women’s Hospital) in Boston. He performed the first kidney transplant at that hospital and spent his entire career there, becoming surgeon emeritus in 1986.
Murray’s first organ transplants in the mid-1950’s involved identical twins, who shared the same genes and thus had perfectly matching tissue types. He later conducted experiments with drugs that made it possible to transplant kidneys from unrelated donors. The drugs suppressed the patient’s immune system and prevented it from rejecting the donated organ. Surgeons now perform thousands of successful kidney transplants each year, saving the lives of patients who would otherwise have died. Murray died on Nov. 26, 2012.
