Timeline of Organ Transplantation
Transplantation from Reverdin's skin grafts of 1869 and the first successful full-thickness cornea graft in 1905 through the first lasting kidney transplant (1954), the first human-to-human heart transplant (1967), anti-rejection drugs and face transplants to pig kidney trials in 2025.
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- Medicine & Health
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- 30 events 1869 – 2025
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- by claude-opus-5-5
1869: Reverdin shows that small skin grafts take
Jaques-Louis Reverdin, a Swiss surgeon training in Paris, found that tiny, thin pieces of a patient's own skin, later called pinch grafts, would take on a wound, where thick grafts usually failed. Surgeons soon tried skin from other people too; in 1871 George Pollock in London reported that such grafts disappeared while the patient's own held, an early sign of rejection that was largely ignored for decades.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jaques-Louis_Reverdin1883: Kocher implants thyroid tissue to replace a lost gland
Theodor Kocher, a surgeon in Bern, Switzerland, implanted thyroid tissue into a patient who had developed the symptoms of thyroid deficiency after the whole gland was removed for goiter. The historian Thomas Schlich regards it as the first organ transplant in the modern sense, a graft meant to restore a missing organ's function; around 1900 surgeons applied the idea to other glands and to the kidney.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Transplantation_(medicine)#History1902: Carrel publishes a method for joining blood vessels
Alexis Carrel, a young surgeon in Lyon, published a way of joining blood vessels end to end with fine needles and thread, which made it possible to reconnect a transplanted organ's circulation; Mathieu Jaboulay and Julius Dörfler had sutured vessels before him. Working with Charles Guthrie in Chicago a few years later, Carrel found that an animal's own organs could work in a new site but organs from another animal always failed, and he received the 1912 Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Alexis_Carrel1905: Zirm performs a successful cornea transplant
On December 7 in Olomouc, Moravia, then part of Austria-Hungary, the ophthalmologist Eduard Zirm grafted corneas from an 11-year-old boy whose injured eyes had to be removed into Alois Glogar, a laborer blinded by lime burns. One graft stayed clear and Glogar returned to work; it is regarded as the first successful full-thickness corneal transplant in a human.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Eduard_Zirm1931: Filatov grafts a cornea from a deceased donor
After attempts dating back to 1912, Vladimir Filatov in Odessa, in the Soviet Union, successfully transplanted a cornea taken from a dead person, and found that corneas stored cold for a few days did better than those used at once. Using the dead as donors eased a shortage of tissue; the Eye-Bank for Sight Restoration, usually described as the first eye bank, was founded in New York in 1944.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vladimir_Filatov1933: Voronyi attempts a human-to-human kidney transplant
In Kherson, in Soviet Ukraine, the surgeon Yurii Voronyi (also spelled Voronoy) connected a kidney from a man who had died six hours earlier to the thigh vessels of a 26-year-old woman in kidney failure from mercuric chloride poisoning. Little urine was produced and she died two days later; the delay and a blood-group mismatch were probably decisive. It was the first human-to-human kidney transplant, but, published in Russian, it remained little known in the West until the 1950s.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Yurii_Voronyi1943: Gibson and Medawar link graft rejection to immunity
Treating burns at Glasgow Royal Infirmary during World War II, the plastic surgeon Thomas Gibson and the zoologist Peter Medawar found that skin grafts from another person failed and that a second set from the same donor was destroyed faster than the first, the mark of an immune response. Georg Schöne had described this in animals in 1912, but Medawar's rabbit studies, published in 1944, set out the timing and tissue changes of rejection in detail.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Peter_Medawar1953: Billingham, Brent and Medawar induce acquired tolerance
At University College London, Rupert Billingham, Leslie Brent and Peter Medawar injected fetal mice with cells from another strain; as adults the mice accepted skin grafts from that strain but not from others. Their October report in Nature, which built on Ray Owen's 1945 finding that twin cattle carry each other's blood cells and confirmed a prediction by Macfarlane Burnet, showed that rejection is not inevitable; Medawar and Burnet shared the 1960 Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Immune_tolerance1954: Murray transplants a kidney between identical twins
On December 23 at the Peter Bent Brigham Hospital in Boston, a team including the surgeons Joseph Murray and J. Hartwell Harrison and the physician John Merrill transplanted Ronald Herrick's kidney into his identical twin, Richard, who lived eight more years. Because the twins were genetically identical, the kidney was not rejected; it was the first human solid-organ transplant with lasting success, after failed attempts in Chicago, Paris and Boston. Murray shared the 1990 Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine with E. Donnall Thomas, a pioneer of bone marrow transplantation.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Joseph_E._Murray1958: Dausset describes the first human leukocyte antigen
Jean Dausset in Paris described an antibody that clumped the white blood cells of some people but not others; the antigen it detected, which he called MAC and is now known as HLA-A2, was the first human leukocyte antigen (HLA). Matching donors for these antigens, made practical by Paul Terasaki's test of 1964, became central to bone marrow transplants and to choosing family organ donors, and Dausset shared the 1980 Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jean_Dausset1962: Azathioprine enables a graft from an unrelated donor
At the Peter Bent Brigham Hospital in Boston, Joseph Murray's team gave azathioprine, a drug made by Gertrude Elion and George Hitchings and tested in dogs by Roy Calne, to a man who received a deceased donor's kidney in April; he survived more than a year, the first such lasting success with drugs rather than total-body irradiation. Combined with high doses of prednisone, as Willard Goodwin in Los Angeles and Thomas Starzl in Denver showed, it became the standard anti-rejection treatment for about two decades.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Azathioprine1963 – 1964: Surgeons transplant chimpanzee organs into patients
With long-term dialysis still scarce, Keith Reemtsma at Tulane University in New Orleans transplanted chimpanzee kidneys into 13 patients; most died within two months, but a young schoolteacher lived about nine months. A chimpanzee heart that James Hardy placed in a dying man in Mississippi beat for roughly an hour. Later primate grafts, including a baboon heart given to the infant known as Baby Fae in 1984, also failed within weeks or months.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Keith_Reemtsma1966: Kelly and Lillehei attempt a pancreas transplant
On December 17 at the University of Minnesota, William Kelly and Richard Lillehei transplanted part of a pancreas, with a kidney, into a 28-year-old woman with type 1 diabetes and kidney failure, the first pancreas transplant; the graft was removed after complications and she died within months. The recipient of a whole pancreas and kidney that Lillehei's team transplanted two weeks later lived four and a half months, and such combined grafts became a treatment for diabetic kidney failure.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pancreas_transplantation1967: Starzl achieves the first year-long liver transplant survival
At the University of Colorado in Denver, Thomas Starzl's team transplanted a liver into Julie Rodriguez, a toddler with a liver tumor, who became the first liver recipient to live more than a year; none of his five patients in 1963 had lived more than 23 days. Results stayed poor until cyclosporine, and a US National Institutes of Health consensus conference in 1983 judged liver transplantation a clinical service rather than an experiment.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Thomas_Starzl1967: Barnard performs the first human-to-human heart transplant
On December 3 at Groote Schuur Hospital in Cape Town, Christiaan Barnard transplanted the heart of Denise Darvall, 25, fatally injured by a car, into Louis Washkansky, 54, who died of pneumonia 18 days later. Barnard used methods developed by Norman Shumway and Richard Lower in the United States. The operation set off about 100 heart transplants worldwide in 1968; only a third of the recipients lived longer than three months, and many programs stopped.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Christiaan_Barnard1968: Harvard committee defines irreversible coma as death
An ad hoc committee at Harvard Medical School proposed in the Journal of the American Medical Association that irreversible coma, with no response, movement, breathing or reflexes, be accepted as a new criterion for death. Echoing the "coma dépassé" described by the French neurologists Pierre Mollaret and Maurice Goulon in 1959, it eased the removal of organs from donors whose hearts still beat, though critics asked whether the needs of transplant surgeons had shaped it.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Brain_death#Medicolegal_history1978: Calne reports cyclosporine in kidney transplants
Roy Calne's team at the University of Cambridge reported giving cyclosporine, a compound from a soil fungus that Sandoz scientists in Basel had found to suppress immunity in 1972, to kidney recipients. Combined with prednisone, as Thomas Starzl proposed, it raised graft survival and made liver, heart and lung transplants practical, and the US Food and Drug Administration approved it in 1983. Credit for its discovery is disputed between Jean-François Borel and Hartmann Stähelin.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ciclosporin1981: Reitz performs the first successful heart–lung transplant
On March 9 at Stanford University Hospital, a team led by Bruce Reitz and Norman Shumway replaced the heart and lungs of Mary Gohlke, a 45-year-old with primary pulmonary hypertension, who lived five more years. Earlier heart–lung recipients, starting with Denton Cooley's in 1968, had died within weeks; Reitz credited cyclosporine, which unlike earlier drugs did not hinder the healing of the joined airways.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Heart%E2%80%93lung_transplant1983: Cooper's team achieves a lasting lung transplant
On November 7 at Toronto General Hospital, a team led by Joel Cooper replaced one lung of Tom Hall, a 58-year-old with pulmonary fibrosis, who lived six more years. None of some 44 earlier lung recipients worldwide, beginning with James Hardy's patient in Mississippi in 1963, had survived long; Cooper's team went on to perform the first successful double-lung transplant in 1986.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Joel_D._Cooper1984: US Congress passes the National Organ Transplant Act
Prompted in part by a Virginia company's plan to broker kidneys for a fee, the National Organ Transplant Act (NOTA) made it a federal crime to buy or sell human organs for transplantation and created an Organ Procurement and Transplantation Network (OPTN) to match donors with recipients across the United States. The United Network for Organ Sharing (UNOS) won the first contract to run the network in 1986.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/National_Organ_Transplant_Act_of_19841989: Starzl's team introduces tacrolimus for transplant patients
Thomas Starzl's group at the University of Pittsburgh began giving tacrolimus (FK-506) to liver recipients, at first to rescue grafts failing despite cyclosporine. Made by a soil bacterium, Streptomyces tsukubaensis, from a Japanese sample and described in 1987 by a Fujisawa Pharmaceutical team led by Tohru Kino, it was approved by the US Food and Drug Administration for liver transplants in 1994 and has largely replaced cyclosporine as the main anti-rejection drug.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tacrolimus1989: Surgeons transplant part of a living donor's liver
Drawing on methods for cutting down adult livers for children, surgeons began grafting part of a parent's liver into a child: Silvano Raia in São Paulo made the first attempt in December 1988, and the first success is usually credited to Russell Strong in Brisbane in July, though some sources credit Raia. Because deceased donors were scarce in much of Asia, centers in Japan and Hong Kong extended the method to adults, including the first adult right-lobe graft, in Hong Kong in 1996.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Liver_transplantation#Living_donor_transplantation1989: Spain creates its National Transplant Organization
Spain's Ministry of Health set up the National Transplant Organization (ONT) to coordinate donation through trained coordinators, mostly intensive care doctors, in hospitals. Deceased donation, low despite a 1979 law presuming consent, rose from about 14 donors per million people to more than 30 within a decade and later to the highest rate reported worldwide; Spanish officials credit organization rather than the opt-out law, a view some studies of such laws question.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/National_Transplant_Organization1998: Dubernard's team transplants a hand in Lyon
On September 23, an international team led by Jean-Michel Dubernard attached a deceased donor's hand to Clint Hallam, a New Zealander who had lost his own in an accident. The graft was removed at Hallam's request in 2001, while a hand transplanted in Louisville, Kentucky, in January 1999 became the first long-term success; a 1964 attempt in Ecuador had been rejected within weeks.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hand_transplantation2005: French surgeons perform the first partial face transplant
On November 27 at Amiens University Hospital, a team led by Bernard Devauchelle and Jean-Michel Dubernard grafted the nose, lips and chin of a brain-dead donor onto Isabelle Dinoire, whose face had been mauled by her dog; she lived with the graft for more than ten years. A team led by Joan Pere Barret at Vall d'Hebron University Hospital in Barcelona performed the first full face transplant in March 2010.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Isabelle_Dinoire2008: Declaration of Istanbul condemns organ trafficking
A summit of 151 transplant professionals, officials and ethicists in Istanbul, convened by The Transplantation Society and the International Society of Nephrology, defined organ trafficking, transplant tourism and transplant commercialism and called for them to be prohibited because they exploit poor and vulnerable donors. Several countries, including Israel, Pakistan and the Philippines, later tightened their laws on organ sales, and the declaration was updated in 2018.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Declaration_of_Istanbul2014: Swedish woman gives birth after a uterus transplant
In September a Swedish woman born without a uterus gave birth to a boy by cesarean section at about 32 weeks, the first live birth after a uterus transplant, reported in The Lancet. She had received the uterus from a living 61-year-old donor in an operation led by Mats Brännström at the University of Gothenburg; earlier grafts in Saudi Arabia in 2000 and Turkey in 2011 had not led to a live birth.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Uterus_transplantation2022: Surgeons transplant a gene-edited pig heart into a patient
On January 7 at the University of Maryland Medical Center, Bartley Griffith and Muhammad Mohiuddin transplanted the heart of a pig with ten gene edits, bred by the company Revivicor, into David Bennett Sr., 57, who was ineligible for a human heart, under compassionate-use rules of the US Food and Drug Administration. He lived two months; a second recipient, Lawrence Faucette, lived about six weeks after a transplant in September 2023.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bartley_P._Griffith2024: Gene-edited pig kidney transplanted into a living patient
On March 16 at Massachusetts General Hospital in Boston, surgeons transplanted a pig kidney with 69 genetic edits made by the company eGenesis into Richard Slayman, 62, whose human kidney transplant had failed, the first such graft in a living person; earlier gene-edited pig kidneys had been tested in brain-dead bodies. Slayman died in May; an autopsy attributed his death to heart problems, not the kidney.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Richard_Slayman2025: First clinical trial of pig kidney transplants begins
NYU Langone Health in New York announced in November the first transplant in EXPAND, a clinical trial sponsored by United Therapeutics of pig kidneys with ten gene edits, planned to start with six patients. Earlier compassionate-use recipients included Tim Andrews, who lived with an eGenesis pig kidney from Massachusetts General Hospital for 271 days, a record for a pig kidney at the time, before it was removed in October as its function declined.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Xenotransplantation