Dr. Joseph Murray led a team at Peter Bent Brigham Hospital in transplanting a healthy kidney from Ronald Herrick into his dying twin Richard. Because the brothers were identical twins, the immune rejection that had doomed every previous transplant attempt did not occur. Richard lived another eight years, and the operation opened the era of organ transplantation, eventually earning Murray the Nobel Prize in Medicine.
Richard Herrick was dying of chronic nephritis, and doctors knew a transplant was his only hope—but every prior kidney transplant, dating back to failed attempts in the 1930s and 1950s, had ended in rejection within days or weeks as the recipient's immune system attacked the foreign tissue. Murray's insight was to exploit the one loophole biology allowed: identical twins share the same tissue type, so a graft between them would look, to the immune system, like the body's own flesh.
To confirm the twins were truly identical, doctors swapped skin grafts between the brothers before the operation and watched to see if they took. They did. On the operating table, Murray's team worked for hours, and the transplanted kidney began producing urine almost immediately. Richard Herrick recovered, married the nurse who had cared for him, and lived until 1962. Ronald Herrick, who donated the organ, lived to be 79. The operation proved organ transplantation was possible and set off decades of research into immunosuppression that would eventually make transplants between unrelated people routine.
Key people: Joseph Murray, Richard Herrick, Ronald Herrick