Roy Calne was a British surgeon who specialized in organ transplants, working with the teams who conducted the first liver transplant, intestinal transplant, and several pioneering combined transplants.
- Died: January 6, 2024 (Who else died on January 6?)
- Details of death: Died in Cambridge, England, of heart failure at the age of 93.
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Roy Calne’s legacy
Calne changed surgery across the world and pioneered new methods that allowed transplant patients to live long lives after the procedure. Born in Surrey, England, and educated at Dulwich Prep School and Lancing College, Calne began teaching anatomy at Oxford University in the 1950s. At the Royal College of Surgeon’s Buckston Browne Farm, he and a team conducted a series of kidney grafts on rats, and then on dogs. He found that certain medications could prolong survival, though early experiments did not show a clear path to success.
This work continued into the 1960s and 1970s. Initially unsuccessful, his efforts contributed to the development of both surgical and medicinal techniques to help the body suppress its immune response and accept transplanted organs. By 1968, he had performed the first liver transplant in Europe. Calne continued to expand the boundaries of transplant medicine, doing the first combined liver, heart, and lung transplant in 1987, and the first successful combined stomach, intestine, pancreas, liver, and kidney transplant in 1994, among other notable procedures.
Calne earned numerous honors, including membership in the Royal Society, a Lister Medal in 1984, the Cameron Prize for Therapeutics of the University of Edinburgh in 1988, and a knighthood in 1986. He was also awarded the Ellison-Cliffe Medal from the Royal Society of Medicine in 1990, shared a Lasker-DeBakey Clinical Medical Research Award with Thomas Starzl in 2012, and received a Pride of Britain Award in 2014.
On how his father’s car repairs inspired his approach to transplants:
“If the carburetor is broken, [you] put a new one in.”—from an interview with the Lasker Foundation
Tributes to Roy Calne
Full obituary: University of Cambridge
