Roy Calne, a British surgeon whose work on organ transplantation helped turn what was once considered impossible into a lifesaving procedure for millions of people around the world, died on Jan. 6 at a retirement home in Cambridge, England. He was 93.
His son Russell Calne said he died from heart failure.
There are groundbreaking surgeons and groundbreaking researchers, but very few people are both. Dr. Calne (pronounced “kahn”) was an exception: He developed and practiced many of the operating techniques involved in transplantation, while at the same time working to identify what drugs would get the body to accept a new organ.
The son of an automobile mechanic from the suburbs of London, Dr. Calne had long wondered why damaged organs, like faulty carburetors, couldn’t be swapped out for new ones. But as a student in the early 1950s, he was told repeatedly that it could never be done.
He persevered, though, researching in his spare time as an anatomy instructor at the University of Oxford and later as a professor and the first chairman of the surgery department at the University of Cambridge.
It was rough going. Often working on pigs and dogs, almost all of which died soon after surgery, Dr. Calne drew the ire of animal rights advocates. Someone — he suspected an activist — once left a bomb on his doorstep; Dr. Calne called the authorities, who safely detonated it.
Early on, he used whole-body radiation to suppress the immune response, a procedure that killed virtually all his subjects, including some humans. He eventually switched to using medication, starting with a leukemia drug called 6-mercaptopurine.
