page_title: Michael Woodruff
section_title: Dunedin
hierarchical_section_title: Michael Woodruff / Early career / Dunedin
caption_attribution_description: English: Scott Building - University of Otago Medical School, New Zealand. New Zealand Historic Places Trust Register number: 4790
context_page_description: Sir Michael Francis Addison Woodruff, FRS, FRSE FRCS was an English surgeon and scientist principally remembered for his research into organ transplantation. Though born in London, Woodruff spent his youth in Australia, where he earned degrees in electrical engineering and medicine. Having completed his studies shortly after the outbreak of World War II, he joined the Australian Army Medical Corps, but was soon captured by Japanese forces and imprisoned in the Changi Prison Camp. While there, he devised an ingenious method of extracting nutrients from agricultural wastes to prevent malnutrition among his fellow POWs.
  At the conclusion of the war, Woodruff returned to England and began a long career as an academic surgeon, mixing clinical work and research. Woodruff principally studied transplant rejection and immunosuppression. His work in these areas of transplantation biology led Woodruff to perform the first kidney transplant in the United Kingdom, on 30 October 1960. For this and his other scientific contributions, Woodruff was elected a Fellow of the Royal Society in 1968 and made a Knight Bachelor in 1969.
context_section_description: In 1953, Woodruff moved to Dunedin New Zealand to become Professor of Surgery at the University of Otago. Woodruff had earlier failed in his applications for the corresponding position at St Mary's Hospital Medical School, London and St Andrews University in Scotland. While in Dunedin, Woodruff conducted research on the use of white blood cells to increase tolerance to allografts in rats. This line of research proved unsuccessful, but some of Woodruff's other projects did well. Among his more important accomplishments in the period, Woodruff established a frozen skin bank for burn treatment. As there was no plastic surgeon in Dunedin, Woodruff ended up being responsible for treating burns. He also worked on the phenomenon known as runt disease (graft versus host disease). Although Woodruff had been productive in his four years in New Zealand, Dunedin's population of 100,000 was insufficient to supply a clinical medical school, so he began to look for an appointment elsewhere.
caption: The University of Otago Dunedin School of Medicine, where Woodruff worked from 1953 to 1957.
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