First Kidney Transplant
Joseph Murray performed the first successful kidney transplant between identical twins at Peter Bent Brigham Hospital
December 23, 1954
Transplanting a Living Organ
On December 23, 1954, Dr. Joseph Murray and his team at Peter Bent Brigham Hospital in Boston performed the first successful kidney transplant. The patient, Richard Herrick, was dying of kidney disease. His identical twin brother Ronald donated one of his kidneys. Because the brothers were genetically identical, the recipient's immune system did not reject the donor organ. Richard Herrick lived for eight more years after the operation — long enough to marry his nurse and have two children. Murray received the Nobel Prize in Medicine in 1990 for this and subsequent transplant work.
The Rejection Problem
The key challenge in transplantation is rejection: the immune system treats a foreign organ as an invader and attacks it. Using identical twins sidestepped this problem, but the technique couldn't help the millions of patients who didn't have identical twins. The breakthrough came in the early 1960s when immunosuppressant drugs were developed that could suppress the immune response enough to allow a transplanted organ to survive. This made transplants from unrelated donors possible for the first time.
Transplantation Today
Kidney transplantation is now routine medicine. About 100,000 kidney transplants are performed worldwide each year. Modern immunosuppressant drugs allow most patients to live for decades with a transplanted kidney. Advances in tissue matching, surgical technique, and post-operative care have steadily improved outcomes. The waiting lists remain long — far more patients need kidneys than there are donors — driving ongoing research into lab-grown organs and xenotransplantation (using organs from animals). The 1954 surgery was the first step in a medical revolution. Use our date calculator to track the timeline.