History
The History of Organ and Tissue Transplantation
The scientific knowledge that has made modern transplant medicine possible dates back to the 19th and 20th centuries. The establishment of the U.S. Navy Tissue Bank in 1949 was the nation’s first bone and tissue processing and storage facility; by 1986, there were more than 300 nonprofit bone banks, although consolidation has decreased that number by almost half.
Dr. Joseph E. Murray, the 1990 Nobel Prize for Medicine recipient, achieved the first successful kidney transplant in Boston in 1954. In 1967, Dr. Christian Barnard performed the first human heart transplant in Cape Town, South Africa. In 1978, the problem of organ rejection was largely overcome with a new drug; today, one-year survival rates for most recipients of transplanted organs are between 70 and 90 percent.
During this progression, legal and ethical concerns related to the determination of death led to the first standard set of neurological criteria, which has been adopted by all 50 states. The National Transplant Act mandated many of the regulations safeguarding the donation process and set up a national waiting list for organ transplant patients. Since 1986, all hospitals receiving Medicare funds are required (by “Required Request”) to notify the families of potential donors about their donation options.
