Born in Milford, Massachusetts, Joseph Murray (born 1919) was a pioneer in the field of organ transplantation and, in 1954, was the first to successfully transplant a human kidney. For his efforts he was awarded the 1990 Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine.

On December 23, 1954, Richard Herrick became the first human to receive a successful organ transplant when he was given a kidney from his identical twin brother, Ronald, at Boston's Brigham and Women's Hospital. Joseph Murray was the thirty-five-year-old surgeon who presided over the five and one-half hour operation and took this momentous step in medical science. Today, over 50,000 organ transplants are done yearly in the United States, with seventy-five percent of them involving kidneys, according to the Detroit Free Press. These remarkable procedures developed by Murray and the lives that they save would never have been possible without Murray's groundbreaking efforts. In acknowledgement of this contribution to humankind, Murray...