Joseph Edward Murray was born 1919 in Massachusetts, the son of William Andrew Murray and Mary DePasquale Murray. He earned an A.B. in 1940 from Holy Cross College and then went on to Harvard University to earn his medical degree in 1943. His early work specialized in plastic surgery, in particular reconstructive surgery of the eye and hand. It was a training that would stand Murray in good stead with his later research, for one of the major problems plastic surgeons had to deal with was the rejection of skin grafts by the immune system. Murray and other plastic surgeons soon learned that grafts would take between identical twins.

In the late 1940s, Murray became drawn to the work of a team of doctors at Brigham Hospital who were studying end-stage renal disease, and one of the directions their researches was taking was transplantation. Research had been progressing over the...