A Man of Another Kidney

The 24-year-old accountant was dying of longstanding kidney disease when he went into Boston's Peter Bent Brigham Hospital in January of 1962. Doctors used heroic measures, but it looked like a losing battle. Then another Brigham patient died after a heart operation. The hospital's famous team of kidney-transplant pioneers (TIME, May 3) rushed into action.

The man who died had been on a heart-lung machine and his temperature cooled to 68DEG F., which gave his organs a better chance of surviving after circulation was stopped. Thanks to a foresighted arrangement with the heart patient's family, surgeons were able to remove the left kidney from the cadaver within 40 minutes after death. Meanwhile, the transplant team under Physician John P. Merrill and Surgeon Joseph E. Murray was getting the accountant ready to receive the graft. Within another hour they had implanted it in the accountant's right flank, and a total of 125 minutes after the donor's death they switched on the transplanted kidney's new circulation.

The accountant had a stormy course for almost a year. He had received no X rays or chemicals in advance to suppress the body's tendency to reject a graft from anyone other than an identical twin. For this job the Brigham doctors had decided to rely on drugs, and they used a battery of the most potent available: azathioprine (a new immunity suppressor), actinomycin C (an antibiotic used against some cancers), a cortisone-type hormone, heart stimulants, diuretics and even bicarbonate of soda. Time and again, the transplanted kidney began to fail as his body tried to get rid of this "foreign tissue." But each time the drugs won.

Later, surgeons removed the accountant's own diseased kidneys. He still has to take four medicines daily and he has regular blood-cell transfusions. But 16 months after the transplant he is working full time. The Brigham doctors draw no conclusions. They simply note that this is the longest survival for a kidney transplanted from a dead donor to an unrelated patient.

This file is automatically generated by a robot program, so reader's discretion is required.