British surgeon Sir Roy Calne, a pioneer of global organ transplantation who in 1968 led Europe's first liver transplant operation, died of heart failure on the night of Saturday 6 January at the age of 93 in Cambridge. Emeritus professor of surgery at the University of Cambridge, Calne completed the first successful European liver transplant at Addenbrooke's Hospital, Cambridge, a year after the first successful liver transplant in the United States.
His son Russell said in a statement to the BBC that Sir Roy Calne was “an incredible person to have as a father”. “He was an extraordinary character, a bit eccentric and a wonderful father to six children,” he added. “We were all very, very proud of him for everything he accomplished and did, and we went to some incredible places thanks to his accolades.” .
Born on 30 December 1930 in Richmond, Surrey, a county in south-eastern England, Roy Yorke Calne graduated in medicine from Guy's Hospital Medical School in 1953 while also obtaining a Master of Science from the University of Cambridge. In 1959 he acquired the qualification of surgeon and began working at the Royal Free Hospital and at the Royal College of Surgeons of England where he experimented with kidney transplants in dogs using for the first time in 1960 one of the first immunosuppressive drugs against the body's natural immune reaction against transplantation.
With the first encouraging results obtained, in the period between 1960 and 1961, Calne conducted studies on immunosuppressive drugs working with other transplant researchers at Harvard Medical School and the Peter Bent Brigham Hospital in Boston. Here he collaborated with the American surgeon Joseph Murray who had carried out the first successful human kidney transplant in 1954 and with George H. Hitchings (Nobel Prize for Medicine in 1988 together with Gertrude B. Elion and James W. Black), scientists of Burroughs-Wellcome pharmaceutical company, to develop and test new immunosuppressants.
Returning to England, Calne was appointed professor of surgery first at St. Mary's Hospital in London and then, from 1962 to 1965 at Westminster Hospital. In 1965 he became a professor at Cambridge University. In this period he improved kidney transplant techniques and in 1968 the first European liver transplant program began, describing for the first time the “piggy back” technique, which was definitively established only twenty years later, in 1989, thanks to the American-born Greek surgeon Andreas Tzakis at the University of Pittsburgh.
In the 1980s, Calne was involved in the first pancreas and bowel transplants in the UK, with the first successful heart-lung transplant and in 1994 the first combined pancreas-liver transplant. Knighted by Queen Elizabeth II in 1986, Sir Roy Calne was a Fellow of the Royal Society and the Royal College of Surgeons of England. He has received numerous academic awards and honorary degrees and in 2012, together with Thomas Starzl, the Albert Lasker Prize for Clinical Medical Research for the development of liver transplantation. Other awards include the Lister Medal for his surgical contributions; the Ellison Cliffe Medal from the Royal Society of Medicine; the Prince Mahidol Award, a special award for outstanding achievement in medicine and public health worldwide; the Pride of Britain Lifetime Achievement Award. In 1995 the British Transplantation Society established the “Sir Roy Calne Award” in his honor.
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