Michael Woodruff

Sir Michael Francis Addison Woodruff (1911 to 2001) was an English surgeon and scientist best remembered for his research into organ transplantation. Born in London, he spent his youth in Australia and earned degrees in electrical engineering and medicine at the University of Melbourne. Captured by Japanese forces in the Second World War, he was held in the Changi prison camp, where he devised a method of extracting nutrients from agricultural wastes to prevent malnutrition among fellow prisoners. After the war he returned to England as an academic surgeon and studied transplant rejection and immunosuppression. On 30 October 1960 he performed the first kidney transplant in the United Kingdom. He was elected a Fellow of the Royal Society in 1968 and knighted in 1969, and he retired from surgical work in 1976 to research cancer.