We’re only three days away from Christmas, one of the most popular festivals in the world. Today is 23 December. While it may not appear special on the surface, December 23 holds a significant place in world history.
Joseph E. Murray, Transplant Doctor and Noble Prize Winner dies at the age of 93 on December 23, 2012. He died at the same hospital Brigham and Women’s Hospital, where he performed his first transplant. The cause was complications of a stroke he suffered before he died.
He opened a new era of medicine in history and the first successful human organ transplant was done by Dr. Murray and his team in 1954. Dr. Murray has innovatively done surgery and achieved success in 1954. He removed a healthy kidney from a 23-year-old man and implanted it in the sick identical twin. Dr. Murray was the founder of the techniques that change thousands of patients who received new kidneys, hearts, lungs, livers,s or other organs after their own had failed.
Dr. Murray Was most famous as a transplant surgeon. He was awarded, the Noble Prize in Physiology / Medicine. He shared the $703,000 prize with Dr. E. Donnall Thomas, a pioneer in bone marrow transplantation (who died in October 2012).
Joseph Edward Murray was born on April 1919, in Milford. He attended the College of the Holy Cross and Harvard Medical School, from which he graduated in 1943. After an abbreviated internship at Brigham, he entered the Army Medical Corps in 1944. Dr. Murry worked as an Army Doctor and treat burned soldiers, which lead him to both transplantation and facial reconstruction said by Dr. Murry in an interview.
Soldiers who get skin transplanted survived only for 8-10 days and it would “begin to melt around the edges”. And this experience taught him that tissue from one person might survive for a time in another and that it might be possible to use “tissue from a dead person to save human life”.
