WASHINGTON: Dr Joseph Murray, who won the Nobel Prize for performing the first-ever successful organ transplant, died late Monday at the age of 93, according to the Boston Globe.
After suffering a stroke Thursday, Murray passed away at Boston’s Brigham and Women’s Hospital, where he had performed the landmark kidney transplant on Ronald and Richard Herrick on December 23, 1954, the newspaper reported.
The hospital was not immediately able to confirm the report.
Born on April 1, 1919 in Milford, Massachusetts, Murray traced his interest in the emerging science of transplants to the three years he spent on the surgical ward of an army hospital in Pennsylvania during World War II.
There surgeons would often treat severely burned soldiers with skin grafts from cadavers 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?” Murray would later write in an autobiographical essay published by the Nobel committee.
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,” Murray wrote. — AFP