Joseph E. Murray, MD

Transplant Surgeon, Nobel Prize Winner

During World War II, Dr. Joseph Murray noticed something odd while working at the Valley Forge, PA, General Hospital. Patients with injuries had a tendency to reject skin grafts from non-relatives, while grafts from a pair of twin soldiers healed almost perfectly. His curiosity about this phenomenon led to a revolutionary insight—organ transplantation could be used to save lives.

Dr. Murray performed the world's first successful kidney transplant on identical twins in 1954. He followed up this historic event with two other groundbreaking achievements: the first successful non-identical twin transplant in 1959 and the world's first cadaveric kidney transplant in 1962. Thanks to the discovery of immunosuppressive drugs during the 1960s, Dr. Murray was later able to perform a transplant between two unrelated individuals.

In 1990, Dr. Murray was awarded a Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine for his "discoveries concerning organ and cell transplantation in the treatment of human disease." He participated in NKF's celebration of the 50th anniversary of transplantation at the 2004 National Kidney Foundation U.S. Transplant Games, where he greeted thousands of transplant recipients who had benefited directly from his pioneering discoveries.