Joseph E. Murray (1919-2012)

Abstract

[...]in 1959, Robert Schwartz and William Dameshek, haematologists at the New England Medical Center (now Tufts Medical Center) in Boston, showed that an anticancer drug called 6-mercaptopurine (6-MP), produced by Gertrude Elion and George Hitchings at the Wellcome Research Laboratories in New York, could prevent rabbits from producing antibodies in response to a foreign protein. Soon after this, Roy Calne, a young surgical trainee at London's Royal Free Hospital, and Charles Zukoski and Hume, now chief of surgery at the Medical College of Virginia in Richmond, showed that 6-MP could prolong the survival of kidney transplants in dogs.