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Joseph E. Murray, Transplant Doctor and Nobel Prize Winner, Dies at 93

Dr. Joseph E. Murray, center, and his team perform the first successful kidney transplant operation in 1954.Credit...Brigham and Women's Hospital, via Associated Press

Dr. Joseph E. Murray, who opened a new era of medicine with the first successful human organ transplant, died on Monday in Boston. He was 93.

He died at Brigham and Women’s Hospital, where he performed his first transplant, said Tom Langford, a hospital spokesman. The cause was complications of a stroke he suffered on Thursday, Mr. Langford said.

Dr. Murray’s groundbreaking surgical feat came in 1954, when he removed a healthy kidney from a 23-year-old man and implanted it in the man’s ailing identical twin. Dr. Murray went on to pioneer techniques that over the years changed the lives of tens of thousands of patients who received new kidneys, hearts, lungs, livers or other organs after their own had failed.

In 1990, he was awarded the Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine.

As director of the Surgical Research Laboratory at Harvard Medical School and at Peter Bent Brigham Hospital in Boston, which became Brigham and Women’s, Dr. Murray was a leader in the study of transplant techniques, the mechanisms of organ rejection and the use of drugs to thwart it.

Among other procedures, he performed kidney transplants involving more than two dozen pairs of identical twins. He performed the first successful transplant to a nonidentical recipient, in 1959, and the first using a cadaver kidney, in 1962. And he trained doctors who became leaders in transplantation around the world.

Though Dr. Murray devoted most of his career to reconstructive plastic surgery, he was most famous as a transplant surgeon, especially after receiving the Nobel. He shared the $703,000 prize with Dr. E. Donnall Thomas, a pioneer in bone marrow transplantation, who died in October.

Joseph Edward Murray was born on April 1, 1919, in Milford, Mass., the son of William Murray, a judge, and Mary DePasquale Murray, a schoolteacher. He attended the College of the Holy Cross and Harvard Medical School, from which he graduated in 1943. After an abbreviated internship at Brigham, he entered the Army Medical Corps in 1944.

It was his experience as an Army doctor, especially using cadaver skin to treat burned soldiers, that led him to both transplantation and facial reconstruction, Dr. Murray said in an interview in 2001. Though the transplanted skin would survive for only 8 or 10 days before it would “begin to melt around the edges,” he recalled, the experience taught him that tissue from one person might survive for a time in another and that it might be possible to use “tissue from a dead person to save a human life.”

So when he returned to civilian life and began practicing as a plastic and general surgeon at Brigham, he joined colleagues in investigating the possibilities of organ transplants. At the time, he recalled, organ transplantation was considered such a wild dream that a medical school mentor advised him to abandon the idea as a clinical dead end.

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Dr. Murray, top left, and his team of surgeons with identical twins Richard, bottom left, and Ronald Herrick, bottom right, after the first successful kidney transplant surgery in 1954. Richard received his brother's healthy kidney.Credit...Courtesy of Brigham and Women's Hospital

At Brigham, the work “was considered a fringe project,” he wrote in his autobiography, “Surgery of the Soul,” published in 2001 by Science History Publications/USA.

But he and his colleagues began testing surgical techniques with dogs, removing and reimplanting kidneys. Then, in October 1954, Richard Herrick, a Massachusetts man dying of chronic nephritis, a kidney disease, was admitted to the hospital, and his doctors referred him to Dr. Murray as a possible transplant recipient. The man’s identical twin, Ronald, was willing to give him a kidney. Would Dr. Murray perform the surgery?

It was a daunting prospect. Dr. Murray worried about “taking a normal person and doing a major operation not for his benefit but for another person’s,” he said in the 2001 interview.

“We were criticized for playing God,” he said.

After consulting with clergy members from a range of denominations, and comparing the Herricks’ fingerprints to be sure they were identical and not merely fraternal twins, Dr. Murray and his colleagues decided to go ahead. They first practiced their surgical techniques on a cadaver. The donor kidney “was the only kidney in the universe that was compatible,” Dr. Murray said, “and I did not want to goof it up for technical reasons.”

The surgery took place on Dec. 23, 1954. As Dr. Murray wrote later, “There was a collective hush in the operating room” as blood began to flow into the implanted kidney and urine began to flow out of it.

Richard Herrick, who later married one of his nurses, survived until 1962, when he died of a recurrence of his original disease. Ronald Herrick died in 2010 at 79.

Two other patients were important to Dr. Murray’s medical career, both professionally and personally.

The first was Charles Woods, a 22-year-old Army flier who had been badly burned in December 1944 when his plane crashed in Burma (now Myanmar). He was flown to Valley Forge General Hospital in Pennsylvania, where Dr. Murray was a junior member of the medical team that treated Mr. Woods with scores of skin grafts and operations to reconstruct his destroyed face and hands.

Dr. Murray was mightily impressed with his patient’s fortitude, pluck and faith, and they stayed in touch over the years as Mr. Woods — recovered but still disfigured — reared a family and became a successful businessman in Alabama.

“He taught all of us who cared for him how a will to live can overcome enormous odds,” Dr. Murray wrote in his autobiography.

The second patient was Raymond Francis McMillan, who was born with Moebius syndrome, a condition involving heart defects and facial deformities so severe that he was abandoned as a child to a mental institution. In 1964, when he was released at age 21, people who knew him referred him to Dr. Murray.

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Dr. Murray was awarded the Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine in 1990.Credit...Eric Miller/Associated Press

Step by step, in a series of operations, Dr. Murray and his colleagues reconstructed and repositioned Mr. McMillan’s jaw so that for the first time he could swallow normally, control saliva and smile. They then repaired his palate and his nose. Other doctors repaired his heart defects.

Although the doctors were never able to give him an ordinary appearance, Mr. McMillan took his place in the world. The doctors had encouraged him to earn his high school equivalency diploma and arranged work for him in hospital laboratories.

Surgery had enabled “his inner self to grow and glow,” Dr. Murray wrote. The title of his autobiography, “Surgery of the Soul,” was the phrase he used to describe the phenomenon.

In 1971, Dr. Murray resigned as chief of transplant surgery at Brigham to concentrate on plastic surgery — a field, he often said with regret, that had become wrongly associated with mere cosmetic procedures.

In this country and abroad, he treated hundreds of children and adults with congenital facial deformities, survivors of drastic surgery for head and neck cancers, and patients with injuries or other problems. He often used techniques pioneered by Dr. Paul Tessier of France to treat Crouzon syndrome, which produces congenital facial deformities.

In 1945, Dr. Murray married Virginia Link, an aspiring singer he had met at a Boston Symphony Orchestra concert while he was in medical school.

In addition to Mrs. Murray, known as Bobby, his survivors include three sons, Richard, J. Link and Thomas; three daughters, Virginia Murray, Margaret Murray Dupont and Dr. Katherine Murray Leisure; and 18 grandchildren.

Dr. Murray, who lived in Wellesley, Mass., was a prominent summer resident of Chappaquiddick Island, off Martha’s Vineyard in Massachusetts, where he and Mrs. Murray bought a plot in 1970 and camped on it with their family until they could build a house there.

Dr. Murray was elected to the National Academy of Sciences and the Institute of Medicine. A Roman Catholic, he was also a member of the Pontifical Academy of Sciences, which advises the Vatican on science issues. He donated his share of the Nobel award to Harvard Medical School, Brigham and Women’s Hospital and Boston Children’s Hospital, where he had also treated plastic surgery patients.

After he retired, he remained in high demand as a speaker, mostly addressing medical students and telling them to “keep your eye on helping the patient,” he said in 2001.

“It’s the best time ever to be a doctor,” he would tell them, “because you can heal and treat conditions that were untreatable even a few years ago.”

A correction was made on 
Nov. 27, 2012

An earlier version of this obituary incorrectly identified the publisher of Dr. Murray’s autobiography. It is Science History Publications/USA, not History Publications/USA.

How we handle corrections

Michael Schwirtz contributed reporting.

A version of this article appears in print on  , Section B, Page 12 of the New York edition with the headline: Joseph E. Murray, Nobel Laureate And Transplant Surgeon, Dies at 93. Order Reprints | Today’s Paper | Subscribe

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