Rene Wen Suen Chang studied medicine at London University and trained at the Westminster Hospital Medical School. In London he worked as a house surgeon at the Whittington Hospital and registrar at St Stephen’s Hospital, before gaining his fellowship of the college and moving to Saudi Arabia as senior consultant surgeon to the Riyadh Armed Forces Hospital from 1979 to 1989. During his time there he was able to practice in a state of the art hospital and was to fully develop his skills in renal transplantation as he was later to write in an autobiography of these years *Scalpel in the sand; memoirs of a surgeon in Saudi Arabia * (UFT Press, 2011). In 1994 he was appointed the first renal transplant surgeon at St George’s Hospital in London. Aware that other London hospitals had had transplant units for ten or even twenty years, he was keen to catch up fast. He recruited Mr Bewick and Sue Snowden from the Dulwich Hospital in 1995 and initiated an annual public audit which, unusually, could be freely attended. He was the first transplantation practitioner to successfully use tacrolimus as an immunosuppressive agent and, due to the lack of suitably qualified staff, he began a training programme for transplantation surgical trainees. Needing experts in access and laparoscopic surgery, he encouraged surgeons from France and the Czech Republic to join his team. He also established a research laboratory to further investigate preservation of donor organs. The expertise of his department was such that for four consecutive years there was no transplant related death and the success rate was 100%. He retired in 2009 and, during his last year, the unit performed 157 kidney transplants, the highest ever number. Heavily involved in the international transplantation scene, he was to be found speaking at conferences around the world, developing instructional videos and even wrote his own software programmes. During retirement he wrote the autobiography mentioned above and published, on the 40th anniversary of the break in, a political thriller titled *Watergate – the political assassination* (UFT Press, 2012) in which he explored his long held theories that President Nixon was the victim of a right wing plot. He was also hoping to write about his Hakka family origins and the family’s migration from Southern China and he developed a health education board game. He died on 26 April 2019 aged 84.