There is no doubt that it was the work of one man, Alexis Carrel, which laid the foundations of modern organ transplantation. Working first in his native city of Lyons, then in Chicago and finally at the Rockefeller Institute New York, he developed the techniques of successful anastomosis of blood vessels, using extremely fine silk sutures and tiny needles. As early as 1892, he successfully grafted a kidney into the neck of a dog. He was soon able to demonstrate that, although a dog's kidney transplanted into its own neck could survive, even when the opposite kidney was excised, transplant of a kidney to another animal would fail after a few days. Further experiments included transplantation of other organs, including ovary, thyroid, lower limb and heart. In 1914 he wrote to fellow Nobel Prize winning Swiss surgeon, Theodor Kocher about his experiments; “Concerning homoplastic transplantation (from one animal to another) of organs such as the kidney, I have never found positive results to continue after a few months, whereas in autoplastic transplants the results were always positive. The biological side of the question has to be investigated very much more and we must find out by what means to prevent the reaction of the organism against a new organ” (my italics). This, in fact, was going to occupy the next half century of world wide research!
Restricted accessNewsFirst published March, 2015pp. 1-1
