First successful kidney transplant

Joseph Murray (USA, 1919–2012) performed the first successful kidney transplant on 23 December 1954 at the Peter Bent Brigham Hospital in Boston, Massachusetts, USA. The donor and recipient were Ronald and Richard Herrick (both USA) who, because they were identical twins with identical genetic make-ups, did not face the issue of rejection by the recipient’s immune system. Joseph Murray received the Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine in 1990 for his work in human-organ transplantation.

Prior to this, there had been a partial kidney transplant which had proven successful at the same hospital. In 1946, a housewife was admitted to the Peter Bent Brigham Hospital with kidney failure, following a backroom abortion that had gone wrong. The treatment called for dialysis, a technology at only an embryonic stage at this point and not available in the USA at all. As a result, two surgeons at the hospital – Charles Hufnagel and David Hume, who had been experimenting with kidney transplants in dogs – decided to connect a real kidney to her, though not internally. Instead, they grafted it to her arm and taped the organ in place with a moist gauze. They kept the organ warm by the light of a gooseneck lamp, as the kidney functioned as it should the urine dripping straight from the kidney into a flask from the laboratory. A few days later, the kidney started to fail, as the doctors expected, but it had done its job and given her own kidneys a chance to recover. She was sent home and unfortunately died three months later – not from kidney disease, but from a blood transplant made from a pool of blood that was infected by hepatitis.