Joseph Murray

Joseph Edward Murray was an American plastic surgeon who earned his medical degree from Harvard in 1943 and, on 23 December 1954 at Peter Bent Brigham Hospital, performed the world's first successful kidney transplant, moving a healthy kidney from Ronald Herrick into his identical twin brother Richard, who was dying of chronic nephritis, in a five-and-a-half-hour operation. He went on to perform the first successful kidney transplant between non-identical siblings in 1959 and the first successful transplant from a deceased donor using immunosuppressive drugs in 1962, helped organize the first international conference on human kidney transplantation, and founded the registry that became the forerunner of the modern United Network for Organ Sharing. For this body of work, regarded as founding the field of organ transplantation, he shared the 1990 Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine with E. Donnall Thomas.