Roy Calne a pioneer of organ transplant surgery dies at 93

Описание: While making the rounds at a London hospital in 1950, a medical student named Roy Calne was presented with a young man dying from kidney failure. Make him comfortable, Dr. Calne was told, because the patient would be dead within two weeks. The order troubled Dr. Calne (pronounced “kahn”), who had grown up tinkering with cars in his father’s auto shop, learning how to take apart an engine and put it back together again. Wasn’t it possible, he asked, to remove the failing kidney and swap in a working one, like replacing a spark plug or — his mind drifted to gardening — grafting a rose? Impossible, he was told.“Well, I’ve always tended to dislike being told that something can’t be done,” Dr. Calne said in a New York Times interview years later. Dr. Calne, who died Jan. 6 at age 93, went on to revolutionize organ transplant surgery, pioneering the use of drugs and surgical techniques that gave hope to millions of people for whom organ failure had been a death sentence. Along with another visionary surgeon, Thomas E. Starzl of the United States, he helped turn a risky experimental procedure into a widely accepted treatment, performing some of the first liver transplants and multi-organ transplantations even as colleagues hesitated to back his research.“The reason I am here today, and the reason I am able to do my work, is because these two individuals went upstream,” said Srinath Chinnakotla, surgical director of the University of Minnesota’s liver transplant program. “They really were courageous to go against the paradigm then. If they didn’t take those risks, we wouldn’t have liver transplantation at all.”When Dr. Calne began his transplant research in the 1950s, he faced two major problems. One was a matter of technique: How do you remove a faulty kidney or liver and then replace it with an organ that worked? The second was biological: How do you circumvent the body’s immune system, which rejects foreign tissue and treats it like an enemy invader? Early efforts were far from promising. Dr. Calne operated on animals, mainly dogs and pigs, which died almost immediately. Animal rights activists who found out about the procedures sent him a bomb, he told the Times in 2012: “I was suspicious and phoned up the army — who blew it up.”Dr. Calne tried stifling the dogs’ immune systems through radiation, which only made them sick. Then he turned to drugs, using an anti-leukemia agent called 6-mercaptopurine while performing kidney transplants in 1959. This time, one of the dogs lived for more than a month without the new organ being rejected. “It changed something that had been total failure to a partial success,” he said. While Starzl developed surgical techniques in Colorado and then in Pittsburgh, Dr. Calne followed suit a continent away. In 1968, the year after Starzl performed the world’s first successful liver transplant, Dr. Calne undertook Europe’s first successful liver transplant while working as a surgery professor at the University of Cambridge.


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