Transplant doctor, Nobel Prize winner Joseph Murray dies at 93

PanARMENIAN.Net - Dr. Joseph E. Murray, who opened a new era of medicine with the first successful human organ transplant, died on Monday, Nov 26. He was 93 and lived in Wellesley and Edgartown, Mass., The New York Times reports.

He died in Boston at Brigham and Women’s Hospital, where he performed his first transplant, said Tom Langford, a hospital spokesman.

The cause was complications from a stroke he suffered last week, 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 his 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.