Carriage House Plans: Kidney Transplant

Sunday 18 November 2012

Kidney Transplant

Hamburger was born in Paris. Together with René Kuss, Hamburger defined the precise methods and rules for conducting renal transplantation surgery, and is attributed with founding the medical discipline of nephrology. In 1952, at Necker Hospital in Paris, he performed the first successful renal transplant surgery in France, on a 16-year-old carpenter, Marius Renard who damaged his only kidney when he fell off scaffolding, using a kidney donated by the subject's mother. The organ failed, but rejection was staved off for three weeks, a record at the time. In 1955, he created the very first articifial kidney. Hamburger is credited with major breakthroughs in renal transplants: first prolonged success in 1953, first unqualified success between twins in 1959 and non-twins in 1962. He also authored basic research on the immunological basis of kidney disease, graft immunology and auto-immune diseases