Joseph Murray

Joseph Edward Murray was born April 1, 1919, and trained as a plastic surgeon before the problem of rejected organs pulled him toward transplantation. He performed the first successful human kidney transplant, a procedure that had eluded medicine until his hands proved it possible. The breakthrough earned him the Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine in 1990, shared with E. Donnall Thomas, for discoveries in organ and cell transplantation. Beyond the operating room, he organized the first international conference on human kidney transplants and founded the National Kidney Registry, which evolv…