Michael Woodruff Sir Michael Francis Addison Woodruff , FRS , FRCS ( 3 April 1911 – 10 March 2001 ) was an English surgeon and scientist principally remembered for his research into organ transplant ation . 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 nutrient s 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 . Although retiring from surgical work in 1976 , he remained an active figure in the scientific community , researching cancer and serving on the boards of various medical and scientific organizations . He died on 10 March 2001 , at the age of 89 . Early life . Michael Woodruff was born on 3 April 1911 in Mill Hill , London , England . In 1913 , his father , Harold Woodruff , a professor of veterinary medicine at the Royal Veterinary College in London , moved the family to Australia so he could take up the post of Professor of Veterinary Pathology and Director of the Veterinary Institute at the University of Melbourne . The elder Woodruff later became the Professor of Bacteriology . The family ' s new life in Australia was interrupted by World War I , which prompted Harold to enlist in the armed services . He became an officer in the Australian Army Veterinary Corps and was sent to Egypt . The remainder of the Woodruffs returned to London , and the two boys lived with their mother and paternal grandmother in the latter ' s residence in Finchley . However , Michael and his brother went back to Australia in 1917 after their mother , Margaret , died of a staphylococcal septicaemia . The two then spent a short time under the care of an aunt before being rejoined by their father in 1917 . In 1919 , Harold remarried and his new wife raised the children from his first marriage . The two boys did their early schooling at Trinity Grammar School in Melbourne . From then on he spent all of his youth in Australia except for a year in Europe in 1924 when his father went on sabbatical leave at Paris ' s Pasteur Institute . During this time , Woodruff and his brother boarded at Queen ' s College in Taunton , Somerset on the south coast of England . The headmaster at the school derogatorily regarded Australians as " colonials " who were " backward " and put Woodruff in a year level one year lower than appropriate . Upon returning to Australia , Woodruff attended the private Methodist Wesley College , where he enjoyed mathematics and rowing . He won a government scholarship to the University of Melbourne and Queen ' s College , a university residential college . Woodruff studied electrical engineering and mathematics , receiving some instruction from the influential physicist Harrie Massey , then a tutor . Despite success in engineering , Woodruff decided that he would have weak prospects as an engineer in Australia because of the Great Depression . He decided to take up medical studies at the end of his third year of undergraduate study , but his parents wanted him to finish his degree first . Despite his fears regarding his ability to succeed as an engineer , Woodruff placed first in his graduating class with first - class honours . He also completed two years of the maths program with first - class honours . After graduating in 1933 , he entered the medical program at the University of Melbourne . His mentors included Anatomy Professor Frederic Wood Jones . While at the University , he passed the primary exam for the Royal College of Surgeons in 1934 , one of only four successful candidates who sat the examination in Melbourne that year . He finished the program in 1937 and received an MBBS with honours as well as two prizes in surgery . After graduation , he studied internal medicine for one more year , and served as a house surgeon at the Royal Melbourne Hospital . Woodruff then started his surgical training . World War II . At the outbreak of World War II , Woodruff joined the Australian Army Medical Corps . He stayed in Melbourne until he finished his Master of Surgery Degree in 1941 . At that time , he was assigned to the Tenth Australian Army General Hospital in Malaya as a captain in the Medical Corps . According to Woodruff , his time in Malaya was quiet and relatively leisurely as the war in the Pacific was yet to began in earnest . However , after the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor changed the situation and he was posted to a casualty clearing station where he worked as an anaesthetist , before being transferred into the Singapore General Hospital . A Japanese offensive resulted in the fall of Singapore and Woodruff was taken prisoner along with thousands of other Australian and British personnel . After being captured , Woodruff was imprisoned in the Changi Prison Camp . In the camp , Woodruff realized that his fellow prisoners were at great risk from vitamin deficiencies due to the poor quality of the rations they were issued by the Japanese . To help fight this threat , Woodruff asked for permission from the Japanese to allow him to take responsibility for the matter , which was granted . He devised a method for extracting important nutrients from grass , soya bean s , rice polishing s , and agricultural wastes using old machinery that he found at the camp . Woodruff later published an account of his methods through the Medical Research Council titled " Deficiency Diseases in Japanese Prison Camps " . Woodruff remained a POW for three and a half years and later during this period he was sent to outlying POW camps to treat his comrades . As the prisoners were not allowed to be transferred , he had to improvise in his practise . During this time he also read Maingot ' s surgery textbook , as a copy was in the camp , and he later said that reading about the fact that skin allograft s were rejected a fortnight after being initially accepted , had stoked his interest in doing research on the topic . At the conclusion of World War II , Woodruff returned to Melbourne to continue his surgical training . During his studies , he served as the surgical associate to Albert Coates . This position was unpaid , so Woodruff accepted an appointment was a part - time pathology lecturer to support himself . In January 1946 , Woodruff participated in an Australian Student Christian Movement meeting , where he met Hazel Ashby , a science graduate from Adelaide . She made a great impression on Woodruff , and he married her half a year later . The couple were research partners for the rest of their lives . Early career . Soon after his marriage , Woodruff decided to travel to England in order to take the second half of the FRCS Exam . Woodruff took his new wife over with no guarantee of employment , and declined a two - year travelling fellowship to Oxford University offered by the Australian Red Cross because it required him to return home and work . Before departing , he applied for a position as a Tutor of Surgery at the University of Sheffield , and learned en route that they had accepted his application . He took the FRCS exam in 1947 and passed — a result that , in Woodruff ' s view , was certainly not hindered by the fact that one of his examiners , Colonel Julian Taylor , had been with him at Changi . Sheffield . After passing his exam , Woodruff entered his position at Sheffield , where he trained in emergency and elective surgery . Originally , he had planned to do surgical research , but Sheffield had no space for him in its surgical lab . Instead , Woodruff was given a place in the pathology laboratory where he studied transplant rejection , a process in which the immune system of a transplant recipient attacks the transplanted tissue . Woodruff was particularly interested in thyroid allograft s to the anterior chamber of the eye because they did not appear to meet with rejection . Woodruff ' s work with the allografts gave him a solid basis to work in the developing field of transplantion and rejection . To further himself in these areas , Woodruff arranged to meet Peter Medawar , an eminent zoologist and important pioneer in the study of rejection . The two men discussed transplantation and rejection , beginning a lasting professional relationship . Despite his achievements at Sheffield , Woodruff was rejected upon applying for a post at the Royal Melbourne Hospital . Aberdeen . In 1948 , shortly after applying for the position in Melbourne , Woodruff moved from Sheffield to the University of Aberdeen where he was given a post as a senior lecturer , having not known where the Scottish city was beforehand . At Aberdeen , Woodruff was given better laboratory access under Professor Bill Wilson , and was also awarded a grant that allowed his wife to be paid for her services . He took advantage of this access and his wife ' s skills as a lab assistant to investigate " in utero " grafts ( tissue grafts performed while the recipient was still in the womb ) . At the time , the surgical community hypothesized that if a recipient were given " in utero " grafts , he would be able to receive tissue from the donor later in life without risk of rejection . Woodruff ' s experiments with rats , however , produced negative results . Woodruff also commenced work on antilymphocyte serum for immunosuppression , with little initial success . While in Aberdeen , Woodruff also visited the United States on a World Health Organization ( WHO ) Traveling Fellowship . During the visit , he met many of the leading American surgeons , an experience that increased his own desire to continue his work and research . After returning from the US , Woodruff experimented with the effects of cortisone and the impact of blood antigen on rejection . As part of his blood antigen studies , Woodruff found two volunteers with identical blood antigens and arranged for them to exchange skin grafts . When the grafts were rejected , Woodruff determined that rejection must be controlled by additional factors . In 1951 Woodruff was bestowed a Hunterian Professorship of the Royal College of Surgeons of England for his lecture " The transplantation of homologous tissue and its surgical application " . Dunedin . In 1953 , Woodruff moved to Dunedin to take up a position as the Chair of Surgery at the University of Otago Dunedin School of Medicine , New Zealand ' s only medical school at that time . Woodruff had earlier failed in his applications for the corresponding position at St Mary ' s in London and St Andrews University in Edinburgh . While in Dunedin , Woodruff conducted research on the use of white blood cells to increase tolerance for allografts in rats . This line of research proved to be largely 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 the city , 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 four years in New Zealand , Dunedin had a population of roughly 100 , 000 , so there were not enough people in the region to supply a clinical medical school , so he began to look for an appointment elsewhere . Edinburgh . In 1957 , Woodruff was appointed to the Chair of Surgical Science at the University of Edinburgh without requiring an interview . At the university , he split his time equally between his clinical and teaching responsibilities and his research . He was also allowed to appoint two assistant researchers who went on to become prominent in their own right , Donald Michie and James Howard . As a major part of his research , Woodruff served as the honorary director of a Research Group on Transplantation established by the Medical Research Council . The research group ' s principal investigations concerned immunological tolerance ( the body ' s acceptance of tissues , as opposed to rejection ) , autoimmune haemolytic anaemia ( especially in mice ) , and immune responses to cancer in various animals . In his clinical role , Woodruff started a vascular surgery program and worked with the use of immunotherapy as a cancer treatment as well as the treatment of autoimmune haemolytic anaemia . However , his most important clinical accomplishments were in kidney transplantation . Most notably , he performed the first ever kidney transplant in the UK , at the Edinburgh Royal Infirmary . Woodruff had been waiting for the right patient for some time , hoping to find a patient with an identical twin to act as the donor , as this would significantly reduce the risk of rejection . The patient that Woodruff eventually found was a 49 - year - old man suffering from severely impaired kidney function who received one of his identical twin brother ' s kidneys on 30 October 1960 . Both twins lived an additional six years before dying of an unrelated disease . Woodruff thought that he had to be vigilant with his first kidney transplant , as he regarded the British medical community ' s attitude to be conservative towards transplantation . From then until his retirement in 1976 , he performed 127 kidney transplants . Also in 1960 , Woodruff published " The Transplantation of Tissues and Organs " , a comprehensive survey of transplant biology and one of seven books he wrote . He was awarded the 1969 Lister Medal for his contributions to surgical science . The corresponding Lister Oration , given at the Royal College of Surgeons of England , was delivered on 8 April 1970 , and was titled ' Biological aspects of individuality ' . The success of Woodruff ' s clinical transplant programme was recognised and enhanced by funding from the Nuffield Foundation to construct and open the Nuffield Transplant Surgery Unit at the Western General Hospital in Edinburgh . In 1970 an outbreak of hepatitis B struck the transplant unit , resulting in the death of several patients and four of Woodruff ' s employees due to fulminant hepatic failure . Woodruff was deeply shaken by the loss and the unit was closed for a period while an investigation was carried out to develop a contingency plan to avoid such a disaster in future . The unit then resumed operations . Woodruff retired from the University of Edinburgh in 1976 and joined the MRC Clinical and Population Cytogenetics Unit . He spent the next ten years there , engaged in cancer research with an emphasis on tumor immunology using Corynebacterium parva . During that time , Woodruff also published twenty - five papers and two books . After retiring from his cancer research , Woodruff lived quietly with his wife in Edinburgh , traveling occasionally , until his death there on 10 March 2001 at the age of 89 . Legacy . Woodruff ' s contributions to surgery were important and long - lasting . In addition to performing the first kidney transplant in the UK , he devised a method of implanting a transplanted ureter in the bladder during transplants that is still used today . Furthermore , he established a large , efficient transplant unit in Edinburgh that remains one of the world ' s best . Although best known for these clinical accomplishments , Woodruff ' s contributions to the study of rejection and tolerance induction were equally important . Among these contributions , Woodruff ' s work with anti - lymphocyte serum has led to its wide use to reduce rejection symptoms in organ transplant recipients up to the current day . These important contributions to medicine and biology were first seriously honored in 1968 when Woodruff was elected to be a Fellow of the Royal Society . The next year , 1969 , Woodruff was knighted by the Queen , a rare accomplishment for a surgeon . Additionally , numerous medical organizations gave Woodruff honorary membership , including the American College of Surgeons , the American Surgical Association , and the Royal College of Physicians of Edinburgh . Woodruff also held office in several scientific organizations , serving as Vice - President of the Royal Society and President of The Transplantation Society . Finally , Woodruff served for many years as a WHO advisor and as a visiting professor at a number of universities . Despite his profound influence on transplantation and what Peter Morris called " a commanding presence in any gathering " , Woodruff was not known for his ability as a lecturer as he had a rather uncertain style of presentation and had a tendency to mumble . Nevertheless Morris said that Woodruff has " a great turn of phrase and a rather wicked sense of humour " . Morris concluded that " What is surprising is that he was not successful in producing many surgeons in his own mould , despite the intellectual talent that was entering surgery and especially transplantation in the 1960s . However , his influence in transplantation at all levels was enormous . " Publications . Woodruff ' s impact is also apparent in his large volume of publications . In addition to authoring over two hundred scholarly papers , Woodruff wrote seven books during his career , covering numerous aspects of medicine and surgery . Personal life . The Woodruffs had two sons , followed by a daughter . Their first son completed a medical degree at University College London and became an ophthalmologist . The two younger children both did their tertiary education at Sheffield University . The second son became a civil engineer and the daughter completed a science degree in botany . Woodruff and his wife were avid tennis players and had a court in their home in Edinburgh . After moving to Edinburgh , Woodruff took up sailing with the Royal Forth Yacht Club , and went on to compete in some races . He owned a boat was known to go sailing on it in the Mediterranean each summer with his wife . During his student years , Woodruff was a keen rower and field hockey player . Woodruff was a lover of classical music , and after taking up the organ at university and learning from A . E Floyd , the organist of St Paul ' s Cathedral , he became the college organist at Queen ’ s College in Melbourne ; he later learned to play the piano . In his spare time , Woodruff continued to pursue his love of pure mathematics , especially number theory . He periodically attempted to prove Fermat ' s Last Theorem , but failed .