Joseph E. Murray

Joseph E. Murray, born in 1919, American surgeon and Nobel Prize winner. For his work in organ transplants, Murray received the 1990 Nobel Prize in physiology or medicine. He shared the award with American physician Edward Donnall Thomas, who perfected the art of transplanting bone marrow.

Born in Milford, Massachusetts, Murray received an M.D. degree from Harvard Medical School in 1943 and served his internship at Brigham and Women's Hospital in Boston, Massachusetts. He joined the military in 1944 and was stationed at Valley Forge General Hospital in Pennsylvania, where he worked under a plastic surgeon performing skin grafts on badly burned World War II (1939-1945) soldiers. It was here that Murray first considered the organ rejection problems involved with transplanting tissue from one person to another.

In 1947 he returned to Brigham and Women's Hospital, where he joined a team of doctors studying kidney failure and began research on kidney transplants, experimenting on dogs to prove that the operation was feasible. In 1954 he performed the first human kidney transplant, removing a healthy organ from one man and transferring it to the man's identical twin, whose kidneys had failed due to a degenerative kidney disease. The patient with the transplanted kidney lived for eight years after the operation.

Murray then began experimenting with a new class of drugs designed to suppress, or temporarily halt, the human body's immune system so that the transplanted organ would have a chance to establish itself in the body. The immune system attacks foreign substances, such as viruses and bacteria, that invade the body. Transplanted organs are also regarded as invaders by the immune system. By the 1960s Murray and his team were regularly transplanting kidneys from cadavers to patients, using the new drugs to suppress the immune system and boost the patient's chance for survival.