This article originally appeared in the December 2011 issue of DOTmed Business News

The first attempt at a kidney transplant—the results of which were unsuccessful—was performed by a Russian surgeon in 1936. Later efforts took place in the United States, none of which led to positive long-term results for the recipient.

Born in Milford, Massachusetts in 1919, Joseph Murray knew at a young age that he wanted to become a surgeon later in life. He graduated from the College of the Holy Cross, a small liberal arts school in Worcester, Mass., where he studied Latin, Greek, English and philosophy. He then attended Harvard Medical School and held a surgical internship at Peter Bent Brigham Hospital.

After joining the United States Army, Murray served as a First Lieutenant at Valley Forge General Hospital, a plastic surgery center located in Pennsylvania. On several occasions he witnessed the rejection of foreign skin grafts on patients who had been badly burned, experiences that led to his growing interest in organ transplants. In 1937 he began experimenting with skin grafts on identical twins. “This was the impetus to my study of organ transplantation,” he is quoted as saying in his autobiography on the Nobel Prize official website.

Before performing the procedure on humans, Dr. Murray, transplanted kidneys between dogs. During this time he noticed that a dog’s immune system was less likely to reject the organ if the recipient was related to the donor. At that time, doctors had not yet figured out a way to “trick” the immune system into accepting genetically foreign tissue, as they are now able to do through the use of immunosuppressive drugs.

On December 23, 1954, Murray was part of a medical team at Boston’s Peter Bent Brigham Hospital that removed a healthy kidney from 24-year-old Ronald Herrick and transplanted it into his identical twin brother, Richard Herrick, who was suffering from end-stage renal failure. Prior to the procedure, the doctors ran tests to confirm that the twins were in fact identical, and they also successfully transplanted skin grafts between the siblings, leading them to feel more confident that the organ would be accepted.

“Immediately after the clamps were released on the transplanted kidney, it became pink and shortly thereafter urine was seen issuing from the plastic catheter,” Dr. Murray wrote with his co-authors, John P. Merrill, J. Hartwell Harrison and Warren R. Guild, in their article titled, “Successful Homotransplantation of the Kidney in an Identical Twin,” featured in the 1956 edition of Transactions of the American Clinical and Climatological Association. “The urine volume increased and renal function improved daily,” the authors observed.

The surgery went on to make national news headlines as the first successful human-to-human kidney transplant, enabling Richard Herrick to enjoy another eight years of life and making Murray a pioneer in medical history.

Five years following the 1954 kidney transplant between the Herrick twins, Murray went on to perform the first successful kidney transplant between two people who were not genetically related. A few years later, he successfully transplanted a kidney from a dead body into a living human. Throughout the remainder of his career he continued to study organ transplants and the use of immunosuppressive agents to reduce the risk of rejection.

In 1990 Dr. Murray was awarded the Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine, which he shared with E. Donnall Thomas “for their discoveries concerning organ and cell transplantation in the treatment of human disease,” as mentioned on the organization’s website.

Since 1945, the now-retired Murray has been married to Bobby Link, a musician with whom he has six children. In 2001 he authored an autobiography titled, Surgery of the Soul: Reflections on a Curious Career.

Thanks to Murray’s medical work, the kidney has become the most commonly transplanted organ in the United States and continues to give renal-failure patients a second chance at life.