Remembering Dr. Joseph Murray, a surgeon who changed the world of medicine
Harvard Health Publications | Anthony Komoroff
On Monday, Dr. Joseph E. Murray passed away at age 93. A long-time member of the Harvard Medical School faculty, Murray pioneered the field of organ transplantation. This great achievement, for which he was honored with the Nobel Prize in Medicine in 1990, has given the gift of life to hundreds of thousands of people destined to die young. But his success did not come easily.
How many people do you know who try to achieve something that no one has ever before even attempted, because it was judged to be impossible? And keep trying, and keep failing, but still keep tryingâ€"for a decade? And do so despite having each failure seriously criticized by many peers? I’ve only known one such person: Murray. He would not quit.
When he returned to the Peter Bent Brigham Hospital in Boston after serving as a plastic surgeon in World War II, Murray became the surgical leader of a team whose goal was to achieve human organ transplantation, starting with the kidney. Almost all of us are born with two kidneys, and appear to need only one. The other is like an insurance policy. If you take a kidney from a healthy person (the donor), it can be given to someone with two diseased kidneys (the recipient).
The idea behind kidney transplantation was simple. Actually doing it required solving immense problems. How do you hook up the recipient’s blood vessels to the new kidney? What about the nerves and lymph vessels? Where do you put the new kidney? Do you leave the two ailing kidneys in place or remove them? Murray solved those problems and others through studies in animals.
But the seemingly insurmountable problem for organ transplantation was rejection of the transplanted organ. To the recipient’s immune system, the new kidney “looks†foreign. It is treated as an invader, attacked, and ultimately killed. The only exception would be if the donor was genetically identical to the recipient.
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{Register to be an organ,eye and tissue donor. To learn how, www.donatelife.net or www.organdonor.gov}
On Monday, Dr. Joseph E. Murray passed away at age 93. A long-time member of the Harvard Medical School faculty, Murray pioneered the field of organ transplantation. This great achievement, for which he was honored with the Nobel Prize in Medicine in 1990, has given the gift of life to hundreds of thousands of people destined to die young. But his success did not come easily.
How many people do you know who try to achieve something that no one has ever before even attempted, because it was judged to be impossible? And keep trying, and keep failing, but still keep tryingâ€"for a decade? And do so despite having each failure seriously criticized by many peers? I’ve only known one such person: Murray. He would not quit.
When he returned to the Peter Bent Brigham Hospital in Boston after serving as a plastic surgeon in World War II, Murray became the surgical leader of a team whose goal was to achieve human organ transplantation, starting with the kidney. Almost all of us are born with two kidneys, and appear to need only one. The other is like an insurance policy. If you take a kidney from a healthy person (the donor), it can be given to someone with two diseased kidneys (the recipient).
The idea behind kidney transplantation was simple. Actually doing it required solving immense problems. How do you hook up the recipient’s blood vessels to the new kidney? What about the nerves and lymph vessels? Where do you put the new kidney? Do you leave the two ailing kidneys in place or remove them? Murray solved those problems and others through studies in animals.
But the seemingly insurmountable problem for organ transplantation was rejection of the transplanted organ. To the recipient’s immune system, the new kidney “looks†foreign. It is treated as an invader, attacked, and ultimately killed. The only exception would be if the donor was genetically identical to the recipient.
Read more
{Register to be an organ,eye and tissue donor. To learn how, www.donatelife.net or www.organdonor.gov}
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