Keith Reemtsma

Keith Reemtsma (1925 to 2000) was an American transplant surgeon, best known for the cross-species kidney transplant from a chimpanzee to a human in 1964. With only early immunosuppressant drugs and no long-term dialysis available, the woman who received the kidney survived nine months, long enough to return to work. Raised partly on a Navajo reservation in Arizona, he graduated from Idaho State College in 1945 and from the University of Pennsylvania School of Medicine in 1949. He trained at Columbia-Presbyterian Medical Center, was professor of surgery at Tulane University and chaired the surgery department at the University of Utah and later at Columbia University. He also developed the intra-aortic balloon pump as a bridge to heart transplant and did early research on islet cell transplantation for diabetes.