Transplant Pioneer Dr. Paul Russell Dies at 101

Paul S. Russell Jr., MD, FACS, a pioneering transplant surgeon and scientist who helped establish organ transplantation as a viable clinical treatment, died August 22 at the age of 101. 

Over a career spanning more than seven decades at Harvard Medical School and Massachusetts General Hospital (MGH), Dr. Russell helped advance both the surgical techniques and immunologic science that made modern transplantation possible.

Dr. Russell’s interest in transplantation was shaped by early work with Nobel laureate Peter Medawar, whose research helped establish the immunologic basis of transplant rejection. He subsequently built a career bridging laboratory investigation and operative care, developing microsurgical models of organ transplantation and studying immunologic tolerance, graft-versus-host disease, immunosuppression, and chronic graft vascular disease.

After returning to MGH as chief of surgery in 1962, Dr. Russell established the hospital’s clinical transplantation program and performed its first kidney transplant in 1963. His laboratory became a foundation for what evolved into MGH’s Center for Transplantation Sciences. 

Among his notable scientific contributions were developing techniques for heart and kidney transplantation in mice and helping pioneer the clinical use of monoclonal antibodies to prevent or treat acute transplant rejection.

Dr. Russell also helped develop the infrastructure necessary for transplantation to expand. In 1968, he and fellow transplant pioneer Joseph Murray, MD, cofounded the Intra-Hospital Organ Bank, now New England Donor Services, an early independent nonprofit organization dedicated to organ recovery and allocation that helped provide a model for the modern organ procurement organization system.

He became an ACS Fellow in 1958 and was a founding member and later president of The Transplantation Society. His influence continued through generations of surgeons and scientists he trained and through the multidisciplinary transplant program he built at MGH, work that helped lay the scientific foundation for subsequent advances in immune tolerance and xenotransplantation.