Roy Calne, pioneering British organ transplant surgeon, dies aged 93

Roy Calne, a British surgeon whose work in organ transplants helped turn what was once considered impossible into a life-saving procedure for millions of people around the world, died on January 6 at a retirement home in Cambridge, England. He was 93.

His son Russell Calne said he died of heart failure.

There are pioneering surgeons and pioneering researchers, but very few people are both. Dr. Calne (pronounced 'kahn') was an exception: he developed and practiced many of the surgical techniques involved in transplantation, while at the same time trying to identify which drugs would cause the body to accept a new organ.

The son of a car mechanic from the outskirts of London, Dr. Calne has long wondered why damaged organs, such as defective carburetors, could not be replaced with new ones. But as a student in the early 1950s he was repeatedly told that this would never be possible.

However, he persevered and conducted research in his spare time as an anatomy instructor at the University of Oxford and later as a professor and the first chairman of the department of surgery at the University of Cambridge.

It was heavy. Dr. Calne often worked on pigs and dogs, almost all of which died shortly after surgery, angering animal rights activists. Someone – he suspected an activist – once left a bomb on his doorstep; Dr. Calne called the authorities, who detonated it safely.

Early on, he used whole-body radiation to suppress the immune response, a procedure that killed virtually all of his subjects, including some humans. Eventually he switched to taking medications, starting with a leukemia drug called 6-mercaptopurine.

He performed the first successful liver transplant in Europe in 1968, a year after Thomas E. Starzl, a surgeon in the United States, completed the first such procedure in the world.

Yet organ transplantation remained rare and dangerous. Then, in the early 1970s, Dr. Calne from a new drug, cyclosporine. He and his team began testing the immunosuppressive applications and realized the drug could be the cheap and effective solution they were looking for.

The one-year survival rate for kidney transplants rose rapidly from 50 percent to 80 percent, and by the mid-1980s the number of hospitals worldwide offering transplant surgery had risen from a few dozen to more than 1,000.

Dr. Calne continued to hone his craft and achieve surgical milestones. In 1986, he and a fellow surgeon, John Wallwork, performed the world's first liver, heart and lung transplant on the same patient. In 1994, he performed the world's first six-organ transplant, replacing a patient's stomach, small intestine, duodenum, pancreas, liver and kidney in one operation.

In 2012, he and Dr. Starzl received a Lasker Award, the most prestigious award in medicine next to the Nobel Prize.

When asked by The New York Times that year whether he also hoped to receive the Nobel Prize, Dr. Calne: “I have a patient and it has been 38 years since his transplant. He has just returned from a 150-mile bike ride through the mountains. That is my reward.”

Roy Yorke Calne was born on December 30, 1930 in Richmond, a suburb about 10 miles west of London, to Eileen (Gubbay) and Joseph Calne.

Roy entered Guy's Hospital, part of the medical school of King's College, London, in 1946. Most of his classmates were soldiers returning from World War II, and many were ten years older than him.

Midway through his studies, he was assigned to care for a young patient who had died of kidney failure. When the patient asked why he couldn't simply get a new kidney, Dr. Calm down, the senior doctors laughed at him.

“Well, I've always hated being told something can't be done,” he told The Times in 2012.

He graduated in 1952 and then served in the military for three years, mostly in Southeast Asia, where British colonial forces were waging a guerrilla war in what is now Malaysia.

He married Patricia Whelan in 1956. She and their son Russell survive him, as does another son, Richard; their daughters, Jane Calne, Debbie Chittenden, Suzie Calne and Sarah Nicholson; s13 grandchildren; and his brother Donald, a leading expert on Parkinson's disease.

Dr. Calne returned to Britain in 1956. He collected a series of short-term teaching positions while returning to his medical training and beginning his own research in transplantation.

After Oxford, he worked as a physician at the Royal Free Hospital and received a fellowship at the Peter Bent Brigham Hospital (now part of Brigham and Women's Hospital) in Boston, where the first successful kidney transplant was performed in 1954.

In 1965, Dr. Calne Professor at Cambridge. He remained there until 1998, when he became emeritus. After his retirement, he devoted more time to his other lifelong passion: painting.

He often painted his patients – with their permission – and in 1988 he took lessons from one of them, the Scottish painter John Bellany.

Dr. Calne may have been an amateur, but his paintings were widely praised by critics. In 1991, the Barbican Center in London organized an exhibition of his work entitled 'The Gift of Life'.