Joseph E. Murray

While Joseph E. Murray was a medical student, he fell in love with Bobby Link, a music student, who he met at a Boston Symphony Orchestra concert. They got married in June 1945 and had six children.

He donated his share of the Nobel Prize money to Harvard Medical School, Brigham and Women’s Hospital and Boston Children’s Hospital.

A Roman Catholic, he was appointed Academician of the Pontifical Academy of Sciences in the Vatican in 1996.

Joseph Edward Murray was born on April 1, 1919, in Milford, Massachusetts, U.S., to William A. Murray, a lawyer, and his wife, Mary, a school teacher. He was of Irish and Italian descent.

He grew up to be an athletic young boy and was a star performer at the Milford High School. He played a variety of sports like football, ice hockey, and baseball. He joined the College of the Holy Cross after finishing high school where he studied philosophy and English, earning a degree in humanities in 1940.

Becoming a doctor was a childhood dream and the young man enrolled at the Harvard Medical School. The four years he spent there were rich and full of stimulating intellectual experiences. He graduated in 1943.

Murray entered the Army Medical Corps in 1944. As an army doctor, he learned to use cadaver skin to treat burned soldiers. The transplanted skin would survive for only eight to ten days before peeling off, but this experience gave him the idea that tissue from one person might survive on another.

After the war, he joined the surgical staff of the Peter Bent Brigham Hospital. He then underwent training in plastic surgery at New York and Memorial Hospitals. He returned to Brigham in 1951.

The idea of organ transplantation was novel for those times and Murray was often discouraged by his peers and seniors in his quest to make human organ transplantation a reality. Nonetheless, he investigated the possibilities of organ transplants by testing surgical techniques on dogs.

In October 1954, a patient named Richard Herrick was admitted to the hospital. He was suffering from chronic nephritis, a kidney disease, and was on the verge of death. His healthy identical twin brother, Ronald, was willing to give him a kidney. Murray was asked if he would perform the surgery.

Joseph E. Murray performed the surgery—the world’s first human renal transplant—between the Herrick twins at the Peter Bent Brigham Hospital in December 1954. He was assisted by J. Hartwell Harrison and other noted physicians in the grueling operation which lasted five and a half hours. The surgery was successful and Richard lived for eight more years.

Joseph E. Murray performed the world’s first human kidney transplant on December 23, 1954. He removed a healthy kidney from a 23-year-old man, Ronald Herrick, and implanted it in his ailing identical twin, Richard, who was suffering from chronic nephritis. The surgery was successful and Richard lived for eight more years.