On October 30, 1960, the British surgeon Michael Woodruff and his team carried out a kidney transplant at the Royal Infirmary in Edinburgh, and it was the first such operation in the United Kingdom to succeed. The patient and the donor were identical twins, which meant that the tissue of the new kidney matched, and the organ was not rejected, and the patient recovered and lived for several more years. The match was perfect. The operation followed a number of attempts in the 1950s that had failed.
The problem was the immune system. An organ taken from another person is recognised as foreign, and the body attacks it, and the early transplants of kidneys failed for that reason, unless the donor was an identical twin. Surgeons in Paris and Boston had shown by the middle 1950s that a kidney could work for a time between twins, and the work on tissue typing and on the matching of donor and patient followed, and the first drugs that could hold back the immune response were tried at about the same time. The work went on. The Scottish case was part of that line of work.
Woodruff had studied the problem for years and had worked in Australia and in the United States before he returned to Britain, and he wrote widely on transplantation and on the ethics of using organs from living donors, and he argued that the practice should be controlled. He was later made a professor at Edinburgh and was given honours for his work, and he was one of the founders of the transplant programme in Britain.
The operation opened the way for the wider use of transplants. By the late 1960s kidneys were being transplanted from deceased donors and between people who were not related, and the drug ciclosporin, which came into use in the 1980s, improved the survival of transplanted organs a great deal, and heart, liver and lung transplants followed. The field grew. Kidney transplantation is now a routine treatment for kidney failure in many countries.