Transplant pioneer dies at 93
Joseph E. Murray, emeritus professor of surgery at Harvard Medical School, whose many breakthroughs included the first successful kidney transplant, died Nov. 26, after suffering a hemorrhagic stroke at his Wellesley, Mass., home on Thanksgiving. He was 93. Murray shared the 1990 Nobel Prize in physiology or medicine with E. Donnall Thomas, M.D. ’46, for conducting the world’s first successful organ transplant in 1954. At the time, relatively little was known about the intricate workings of the human immune system, but it was clear that a patient’s immune response posed a formidable barrier to transplantation, a problem Murray confronted while serving as a plastic surgeon during World War II. Murray joined the U.S. Army Medical Corps after graduating from Harvard Medical School in 1943. Many of his patients were soldiers with burn injuries, some so severe that the patient didn’t have enough undamaged skin for a graft. When Murray tried grafts using another...