Born on 18 April 1907, Joe Luke was the son of Edward Barker Luke, a nurseryman in Ottawa, and Jane née Corbus, the daughter of J R Corbus, a doctor in Chicago. Joe was educated at Montreal West High School and entered McGill University in 1924. After qualifying in 1931, he did a number of junior jo

Derek Sampson was born in London in 1937 and went to medical school in Birmingham where he obtained a BSc in physiology in 1959. After graduating MB, ChB in 1962 he trained in general surgery passing both the English and Edinburgh fellowship examinations. He had developed an interest in transplantat

Jack Jacobson qualified MB BCh Cape Town in 1942. After completing his internship at Groote Schuur Hospital, he served as a captain in the South African Medical Corps between 1943 and 1946. He then made the decision to embark on a career in surgery and after a period of postgraduate training at Guy'

John Redcliffe Salaman was a general surgeon and professor of transplant surgery in Cardiff. The first transplant in Cardiff had been done by David Crosby in 1967. By 1970 it was clear that a dedicated transplant surgeon with an academic interest was required and John Salaman was appointed to this

The son of Herbert Oakley White, a general practitioner-anaesthetist, Humphrey was born in Southampton on 2 September 1932. His mother was Alice F S Tait, the daughter of a general practitioner in Highbury, London. Humphrey was educated at Marlborough and St John's College, Cambridge, from which he

Thomas Earl Starzl was a pioneering transplant surgeon. Known as the *Father of transplantation* he carried out the first successful human liver transplant in 1967. Born on 11 March 1926 in LeMars, Iowa, he was the second son of Roman (Rome) Frederick Starzl and his wife Anna Laura née Fitzgerald. H

William James Dempster, known as ‘Jim’, was a transplant researcher and surgeon at St Mary’s Hospital, London. He was born on the island of Ibo, north of Madagascar, on 15 March 1918, although his birth was not registered until 28 April and his birth certificate was not issued until 9 August of that

Anthony ('Tony') Barnes, a consultant surgeon at Queen Elizabeth Hospital, Birmingham, was in the vanguard of renal transplantation in the UK and made major contributions to the establishment of the specialty. He was born on 19 June 1934 in Brighton and as a teenager during the Second World War was

Norman Shumway was the father of cardiac transplantation and performed the world’s first heart-lung transplant. Unlike some of his contemporaries who sought the limelight, Shumway spent a decade carrying out research into cardiac transplantation before he was ready to do the operation on a live reci

Joseph Murray had an illustrious career as a plastic and reconstructive surgeon, but his unique achievement was to perform the first successful kidney transplant, on identical twins, in 1954, for which he was awarded a Nobel prize in physiology or medicine in 1990. He was born in Milford, Massach

Bert Myburgh was professor of surgery at the University of Witwatersrand, South Africa. A charismatic and talented surgeon, he was, in his time, South Africa's most renowned surgeon. He was highly regarded throughout the surgical world, and especially within the transplant community. Bert Myburgh w

Rudolf Pichlmayr was a pioneering German transplant surgeon. He was born on 16 May 1932 in Munich, Germany. He graduated from the University of Munich Medical School in 1956, and in 1959 started his career in medicine at the same university. He qualified as a surgeon in 1964. In 1967, he presented h