Sir Michael Francis Addison Woodruff FRS (April 3, 1911 – March 10, 2001) was a British surgeon who performed the first successful kidney transplant in the United Kingdom. He was selected as a member of the Royal Society in 1968 and was knighted in 1969.
Early life
Michael Woodruff was born on April 3, 1911 in London. In 1913, his father, Harold Woodruff (a professor of veterinary medicine), moved the family to Melbourne. The Woodruffs did briefly return to London during World War I, but Michael and his brother went back to Australia in 1917 after their mother died. The two then spent a short time under the care of an aunt before being rejoined by their father.
Other than his time in London and a single year in Paris, Michael spent all of his youth in Australia. Staying close to his family, he attended both primary and secondary school in the Melbourne area, and enrolled in the University of Melbourne for his post-secondary education. At the university, Woodruff studied electrical engineering and mathematics, receiving some instruction from the influential physicist Harrie Massey.
Despite success in engineering, Woodruff decided that he would have weak prospects as an engineer in Australia. So, after graduating in 1933, he entered the medical program at the University of Melbourne. He finished it in 1937 and received an MBBS with honors. At that time, Woodruff also passed the primary exam for the Royal College of Surgeons and won two prizes in surgery. After graduation, he studied internal medicine for one more year, and served as a house surgeon at the Royal Melbourne Hospital.
World War Two
At the outbreak of World War Two, Woodruff joined the Australian Army Medical Corps. He stayed in Melbourne until he finished his Master of Surgery Degree in 1941. At that time, he was assigned to the Tenth Australian Army General Hospital in Malaya as a captain in the Medical Corps. However, after Pearl Harbor, a Japanese offensive resulted in Woodruff's capture.
Changi
After his capture, Woodruff was imprisoned in the Changi Prison Camp. In the camp, Woodruff realized that his fellow prisoners were at great risk for vitamin defiencies due to the poor quality of the rations they were issued by the Japanese. To help fight this threat, Woodruff devised a method for extracting important nutrients from grass and agricultural wastes using old machinery that he found at the camp. Woodruff later published an account of his methods through the Medical Research Council titled "Defiency Diseases in Japanese Prison Camps".
End of the War
At the conclusion of World War Two, Woodruff returned to Melbourne to continue his surgical training. During his studies he served as the surgical associate to Albert Coates, and met Hazel Ashby. Ashby, a science student, made a great impression on Woodruff, and he married her in 1946.
Early Career
Soon after his marriage, Woodruff decided to travel to England in order to take the second half of the FRCS Exam. Before departing, he applied for a position as a Tutor of Surgery at the University of Sheffield, and learned en route that the University had accepted his application. He took the exam in 1947 and passed, perhaps aided by the fact that one of his examiners, Julian Taylor, had been with him at Changi.
Sheffield
After passing his exam, Woodruff entered his position at Sheffield. Originally, he had planned to do surgical research, but Sheffield had no positions open in that field. Instead, Woodruff was given a place in the pathology laboratory at Sheffield. In pathology, Woodruff and his wife studied the process of transplant rejection with an emphasis on thyroid allografts. Also while at Sheffield, Woodruff first met Peter Medawar with whom he discussed transplantation and rejection.
Aberdeen
In 1948, Woodruff moved from Sheffield to the University of Aberdeen where he was given a post as a senior lecturer. At Aberdeen, Woodruff was given better laboratory access, of which he took advantage with his wife serving as his research assistant. In the lab, Woodruff tested the hypothesis that in utero grafts could eliminate the risk of rejection from the same donor's tissue later in life. Woodruff's experiments, however, produced negative results.
While in Aberdeen, Woodruff also visited the United States on a WHO Traveling Fellowship. During the visit, he met many of the leading American surgeons, an experience that increased his own desire to continue his work and research. After returning from the US, Woodruff experimented with the effects of cortisone and the impact of blood antigen on rejection.
Dunedin
In 1953, Woodruff moved to Dunedin to take up a position as the Chair of Surgery at the University of Otago, New Zealand's only medical school at that time. While in Dunedin, Woodruff conducted research on the use of leucocytes to increase tolerance for allografts in rats. This line of research proved to be largely unsucessful, but some of Woodruff's other projects did well. Among his more important accomplishments in the period, Woodruff established a frozen skin bank for burn treatment and worked on the phenomenon known as runt disease or graft versus host disease.
Edinburgh
In 1957, Woodruff was appointed to the Chair of Surgical Science at the University of Edinburgh, where he would stay until his retirement in 1976. At the univeristy, he split his time equally between his clinical and teaching responsibilities and his research. As a major part of his research, Woodruff served as the honorary director of a Research Group on Transplantation established by the Medical Research Council.
The research group's principal investigations concerned immunological tolerance, autoimmune haemolytic anaemia (especially in mice), and immune responses to cancer in various animals. In his clinical role, Woodruff started a vascular surgery program and worked with the use of immunotherapy as a cancer treatment. However, his most important clinical accomplishments were in kidney transplantation. Most notably, he performed the first kidney transplant in the United Kingdom at the Edinburgh Royal Infirmary. The patient was a 49 year old man suffering from severely impaired kidney function who received one of his twin brother's kidneys on October 30, 1960. That same year, Woodruff published The Transplantation of Tissues and Organs, a comprehensive survey of transplant biology.
Legacy
Woodruff's important contributions to medicine and biology were recognized in 1968, when he was elected as a Fellow of the Royal Society. The next year, 1969, he was knighted by the queen for his accomplishments. He was also elected President of the Transplantation Society in 1972, and served as Vice-President of the Royal Society. Finally, he was, for many years, a WHO advisor and a visiting professor at numerous universities. Woodruff died March 10, 2001 in Edinburgh, remembered as a transplantation pioneer.
References
- Morris, Peter (2001). "Sir Michael Woodruff" . The Royal Society of New Zealand. Retrieved May 3, 2006.
- Morris, Peter. Sir Michael Francis Addison Woodruff. Retrieved April 20, 2006.
- "History of Transplants". BBC Health. Retrieved May 4, 2006.
- "History of Kidney Transplantation in Edinburgh". Retrieved May 5, 2006.