Joseph Edward Murray Research Paper

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Pages: 3

he person I believe who has made the biggest contribution in the medical field is Dr. Joseph Edward Murray because of his work with organ transplants. Murray originally started his medical career as a plastic surgeon. He served as a plastic surgeon in the United States Army Murray reconstructed the hands and faces of many soldiers injured in battle during World War II. He became interested in transplantation while working with burn patients. Murray and his fellow plastic surgeons observed that burn patients did not reject temporary skin grafts from unrelated donors as quickly as originally expected. This sparked Murray’s interest in the possibility of transplantation.
In the late 1940’s Murray was part of a group of doctors that studied end-stage renal disease at Brigham Hospital in Boston. The group also studied the practice of kidney transplantation. Murray practiced organ transplants on dogs. During that practice he developed a technique of connecting the donor’s blood vessels to the recipient’s, which is still used today. Murray used this technique during the first kidney transplant in 1954. The patient was a 23 year old male who was
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They successfully used the drug for the first time in a kidney transplant from an unrelated donor. After the successful surgery they started using the drug for transplants with other unrelated donors. The number of people surviving a transplant from an unrelated donor went up 65%. Later drugs like cyclosporine and FK-506 helped push the survival rate even further by using the basic principles that Murray and his team developed. Thanks to those principles more people are surviving organ transplants from unrelated donors. In 1990, Murray and Dr. E. Donnall Thomas shared the “Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine for their discoveries concerning cell and organ transplantation in the treatment of human