Transplant Doc, Nobel winner Murray dies
BOSTON (AP) — Dr. Joseph E. Murray, who performed the world's first successful kidney transplant and won a Nobel Prize for his pioneering work, has at age 93.
Murray's death in Boston was confirmed Monday by Brigham and Women's Hospital spokesman Tom Langford. No cause of death was immediately announced.
Since the first kidney transplants on identical twins, hundreds of thousands of transplants on a variety of organs have been performed worldwide. Murray shared the Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine in 1990 with Dr. E. Donnall Thomas, who won for his work in bone marrow transplants.
"Kidney transplants seem so routine now," Murray told The New York Times after he won the Nobel. "But the first one was like Lindbergh's flight across the ocean."
Murray's breakthroughs did not come without criticism, from ethicists and religious leaders. Some people "felt that we were playing God and that we shouldn't be doing all of these, quote, experiments on human beings," he told The Associated Press in a 2004 interview in which he also spoke out in favor of stem cell research.
http://bigstory.ap.org/article/transplant-doc-nobel-winner-murray-dies-boston