When was the first successful kidney transplant performed?
Experimental allotransplants and xenotransplants of the kidney in animals were begun in the latter half of the 19th century. By the opening decades of the 20th century, unsuccessful attempts at xenotransplantation in humans were undertaken in Vienna by Emerich Ullman (1861–1937), who transplanted a pig kidney in the elbow of a young woman with uremia, and in Lyon by Mathieu Jaboulay (1860–1913), who transplanted a sheep kidney in one patient and a pig kidney in another. The first cadaveric kidney transplant was performed on April 3, 1933 in Kiev by Yuri Voronoy (1895–1961), who transplanted the kidney from a 60-year-old woman who had died from head injury to a 26-year-old woman with acute kidney injury from mercury poisoning, a common cause of kidney injury at the time. The patient died 48 hours later.
Technical difficulties and lack of an understanding of the immunologic basis of organ rejection hampered early efforts at organ transplantation. Their respective study and partial resolution resulted in two Nobel Awards in Physiology or Medicine: the first in 1912 to the French surgeon Alexis Carrel (1873–1944) “in recognition of his work on vascular suture and transplantation of blood vessels and organs,” and the second in 1960 to the British biologist Peter Medawar (1915–1987) and the Australian virologist Frank Macfarlane Burnet (1899–1985) “for discovery of acquired immunological tolerance.” The first documented kidney transplant in the United States was performed on June 17, 1950 on a 44-year-old woman with polycystic kidney disease in Evergreen Park, Illinois. The kidney was rejected. The first successful kidney transplant was performed in Boston by a team led by the nephrologist John P. Merrill (1917–1984) and the plastic surgeon Joseph Murray (1919–2012), who on December 23, 1954 transplanted a kidney from one identical twin, Ronald Herrick, to his brother, Richard. This was before chronic maintenance hemodialysis became feasible, and it generated considerable interest and excitement in the future treatment of kidney failure.
Richard Herrick recovered kidney function, married the recovery room nurse who had cared for him after the transplant, had two children, and enjoyed good health until his death in March 1963. In 1990 Joseph Murray received the Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine, shared with another American physician E. Donnall Thomas (1920–2012), for their contribution to “organ and cell transplantation in the treatment of human disease,” the third Nobel prize to be granted for work on transplantation.
