Dr. Joseph Murray, who won the Nobel Prize for the first successful organ transplant, died on Monday at the age of 93, according to the Boston Globe . Born on April 1, 1919 in Milford, Massachusetts, Dr. Murray traced his interest in the emerging science of transplants to the three years he spent at an army hospital in Pennsylvania during World War II. There surgeons would often treat severely burned soldiers with temporary skin grafts from cadavers.
The prospect of transplanting organs from one living patient to another was controversial from the beginning, with critics viewing it as a violation of nature. But the public started coming aroundafter Dr. Murray’s historic operation in 1954.
In the 1960s Dr. Murray helped to develop the drug Imuran, which suppressed the immune system to allow patients to accept transplants from unrelated donors. He won the Nobel Prize in Medicine in 1990, sharing itwith E. Donnall Thomas, who pioneered bone marrow transplants.
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