Although American surgeons had had limited success in surgical kidney transplants in the 1950s, credit for the first successful kidney transplant in the UK goes to Michael Woodruff. It was in 1960 that he performed the first kidney transplant from a living donor in Edinburgh, through an identical adult twin.
Michael Woodruff (1911-2001) was born of English parents in London, but the family moved to Australia two years later so his father, a Methodist Christian, could pursue his career as Professor of Veterinary Pathology and Director of the Veterinary Institute at the University of Melbourne. Woodruff studied electrical engineering and maths at the same university, but then chose to pursue a medical degree there, eventually becoming a surgeon at the Royal Melbourne Hospital. During World War II he was a captain in the Medical Corp at the Singapore General Hospital, but when Singapore fell to the Japanese, he was taken, along with many British soldiers, to Changi Prison Camp. It was here that his ingenious enterprise of extracting nutrients from grass, soya beans, rice polishings and agricultural waste, was the means of saving many lives by replenishing vital vitamins among the poorly fed prisoners.
After the war, Woodruff moved back to England where he worked in Sheffield for a short while. He applied for the post of Senior Lecturer in the University of Aberdeen in Scotland, which included the appointment of Honorary Consultant in surgery to the Aberdeen Royal Infirmary. It was in Edinburgh, however, that his great breakthrough came when he surgically removed a healthy kidney from a twin to replace the faulty one in his brother. The kidney operation went well for six years, and then the donor died, but of coronary thrombosis; the recipient twin died soon after from stomach cancer. “Between 1960 and 1976,” wrote Woodruff, “127 patients with end-stage renal failure were treated by kidney transplantation in Edinburgh.” As a result of his pioneering work, he was knighted.
In his autobiography, Nothing Venture, Nothing Win (1996), Sir Michael Woodruff wrote a whole chapter entitled The Faith of a Scientist,in which he sought to combine his Christian faith with that of a leading medical scientist; for him, both complemented each other. His faith came alive at the University of Melbourne when he joined the Australian Student Christian Movement (ASCM) and would remain with him throughout his life. “Many students, especially perhaps those reading science, dismiss religious belief as superstition,” he wrote, “others – and their number appears to be increasing – seem content to oscillate between two different views of reality without trying to unify them. For me, and many of my generation, however, the question of whether religious belief, and in particular Christian belief, is compatible with scientific knowledge, was of great concern… I record here that it was through contact with the ASCM that I arrived at an affirmative answer.”
“Heal the sick…” (Matthew 10:8, NKJV).
Image: Sir Michael Woodruff (1911-2001), Wikipedia Public domain