Ten Nobels for the future

Joseph E. Murray was born in 1919 in Milford, Massachusetts, from a father of Southern Irish and English extraction and an Italian mother. He chose to attend a small liberal arts college, College of the Holy Cross, and concentrated on Latin, Greek, Philosophy and English. He then spent four years at Harvard Medical School. "The classmates and faculty were stimulating and friendly. The hospitals were filled with all varieties of patients. Although the hours of study and hospital duty were long, life was rich and full. [...] It was heaven".

His only medical school activity bearing any resemblance to research was a study of the then new Papanicolau smear of epithelial cells. Later, while a surgical intern at the Peter Bent Brigham Hospital, he introduced this technique clinically.

His interest in the biology of tissue and organ transplantation arose from his military experience at Valley Forge General Hospital (VFGH) in Pennsylvania. As a First Lieutenant with only a nine-month surgical internship behind him, he was randomly assigned to VFGH to await overseas duty. VFGH was a major plastic surgical center. During his three years there, the First Lieutenant spent all his available spare time on the plastic surgical wards which were jammed with hundreds of battle casualties. He enjoyed talking to the patients, helping with dressings, and observing the results of the imaginative reconstructive surgical operations.

During his army service Joseph E. Murray always had many burned patients to care for. Some were so extensively burned that donor sites for skin autografts were not available. As a life-saving measure for these patients, skin grafts were taken from other persons and used as a temporary surface cover. The slow rejection of the foreign skin grafts fascinated him. How could the host distinguish another person's skin from his own? Colonel Brown, the Chief of Plastic Surgery, tentatively postulated that the closer the genetic relationship between the skin donor and the recipient, the slower the dissolution of the graft. By observing him successfully trade sections of skin between a pair of identical twins, Murray became encouraged to study a similar procedure with human organs.

Although other researchers were convinced that organ transplantation would never be physically possible, Joseph E. Murray vigorously pursued its achievement. His effort resulted in the first successful transplantation of a kidney from one dog to another, and several years later, in the first successful kidney transplant between identical twins. Following development of anti-rejection drugs, he showed that it was possible to transplant organs between non-identical relatives and from deceased persons to the living. For these studies of organ and cell transplantation he was awarded in 1990 the Nobel Prize in Medicine.

His only wish, he wrote, "would be to have ten more lives to live on this planet. If that were possible, I'd spend one lifetime each in embryology, genetics, physics, astronomy and geology. The other lifetimes would be as a pianist, backwoodsman, tennis player, or writer for the National Geographic. If anyone has bothered to read this far, you would note that I still have one future lifetime unaccounted for. That is because I'd like to keep open the option for another lifetime as a surgeon-scientist."

1997
From bench to bedside:
a circuitous road