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Transplant Pioneer Looks Back

By Bob Levin

I received a kidney transplant in 1958. Back then, transplantation of major organs was the stuff of science fiction. In the course of my treatment, I attended the Harvard Medical School and as a result of that I can claim, figuratively, part of the Nobel prize in medicine.
Let me explain. In the summer of 1958, at my wife's insistence, I went to a local internist for a physical examination. One of my symptoms was a very high blood pressure, with subtle puffiness in the face. I was busy starting a dental practice and raising a new baby daughter and paying off a new mortgage.

I knew that I didn't feel well and blood and urine tests confirmed my worst fears. The diagnosis was chronic glomerular nephritis and both of my kidneys were in a dangerous state of health. Years later I was to find out that my internist was at a loss as far as treatment was concerned until his wife mentioned the transplantation procedures being done at the Brigham Hospital in Boston. She had read about them in a popular magazine.

To be transplanted in those days before cyclosporine and drugs for hypertension, you had to have an identical twin. My twin brother volunteered immediately over his wife's objections--and I do not blame her for that. We were tissue-tested at Huntington Hospital by means of mutual skin grafts. They were positive, and we were asked to come up to Boston.
I went first, leaving my wife and baby at home. I was studied for two weeks and then my brother arrived. Further skin grafts were done and he had Xrays and other tests to determine the condition of his kidneys. After two more weeks, we got the go-ahead for the operation.

When I arrived at Brigham Hospital, where students and most interns and residents were Harvard people, I felt confident though very anxious. The first important doctor to see me there was the chief of plastic surgery, Dr. Joseph E. Murray. He looked me over and I could see in his blue eyes he was deciding on the efficacy of the new kidney's location.
At that time there had been only eight successful transplants and I was hoping to be number nine. On the transplant team were illustrious scientists such as Dr. John Putnam Merrill, who developed the modern day dialysis machine and was professor of medicine and physiology, and Dr. J. Hartwell Harrison, professor of urological surgery and very much a Virginia gentleman.
December 4, 1958 was transplant day. Since many of this newsletter's readers are transplant receipients, health-care professionals and others familiar with transplant, I will not bore you with details about surgical prep and the operating rooms. However, in the four weeks following the operation, doctors had to re-operate to reattach the ureter to the bladder, then do a third operation to remove both of my diseased kidneys.

The major difference in treatment then was that I had to lie on my back for one month to make certain the graft was not disturbed. All told, I was in the hospital for three months. After the success of my surgery and while I was still at the hospital and starting to walk, I met someone who had also received a kidney from a fraternal twin, but he had to be irradiated to reduce his immune response to his twin's organ. His case was also successful.

Following the transplant, my only claim to fame was a front page picture in Newsday with my loyal wife at my side leaving the hospital. She had come up to Boston to cheer me and had taken a job in the billing office because we needed the income. She was in Boston for eight weeks and my mother was able to watch the baby at a cousin's house, for which I'll be forever grateful.
I went back to Brigham for five subsequent years for check-ups and was back for the twenty-fifth anniversary dinner at the Copley Square Hotel in honor of the first successful kidney transplant, involving identical female twins from Oklahoma.
About four years ago, Dr. Murray received the Nobel Prize in Medicine for his research and surgical work. Unfortunately, Dr. Merrill died in a boating accident some years before. Dr. Harrison, I regret to say, died from bladder cancer, an unfitting end for a wonderful urologist.

The groundbreaking research at the Brigham was financed by the A&P Huntington Hartford Foundation, so that I did not have a medical debt to pay. I am grateful to the researchers and especially to my twin, who lives and golfs in Pinehurst, North Carolina. His was a gift for life as you all know, which has enabled me to have a second daughter, now a pediatrician, who has given me two grandsons.
I continued working for forty more years until retirement. I am still in contact with Nobel Laureate Joseph Murray and I went to the new Brigham Hospital recently to see the gold medal on display in the lobby...for which I was given no credit.

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