Roy Calne, a British surgeon whose work in organ transplantation helped turn what was once thought impossible into a life-saving procedure for millions of people around the world, died Jan. 6 at a nursing home in Cambridge, England. It was 93.
Russell Kaln’s son said he died of heart failure.
There are groundbreaking surgeons and groundbreaking 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 working to identify which drugs would make the body accept a new organ.
The son of a car mechanic from the suburbs of London, Dr. Calne had long wondered why damaged instruments, such as faulty carburetors, could not be replaced with new ones. But as a student in the early 1950s, he was repeatedly told it could never be done.
However, he persisted, researching in his spare time as a lecturer in anatomy at Oxford University and later as professor and first chairman of the surgical department at Cambridge University.
It was hard. Often working on pigs and dogs, almost all of whom died immediately after surgery, Dr. Calne drew the ire of animal rights activists. Someone — suspected to be an activist — once left a bomb on his doorstep. Dr. Calne called the authorities, who safely detonated it.
Early on, he used whole-body radiation to suppress the immune response, a process that killed nearly all of his subjects, including some humans. He eventually changed his medication use, 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 world’s first such operation.
However, organ transplantation remained rare and dangerous. Then, in the early 1970s, Dr. Calne learned of a new drug, cyclosporine. He and his team began testing its immunosuppressive applications and realized that the drug could be the cheap and effective solution they were looking for.
The one-year survival rate for kidney transplants rose rapidly to 80 percent from 50 percent, and by the mid-1980s the number of hospitals worldwide offering transplant surgery had grown from a few dozen to more than 1,000.
Dr. Calne continued to hone his craft and reach surgical milestones. In 1986, in collaboration with a fellow surgeon, John Wallwork, he performed the world’s first liver, heart and lung transplant in the same patient. In 1994 he performed the world’s first six-organ transplant, replacing the stomach, small intestine, duodenum, pancreas, liver and kidneys in a single operation.
In 2012 he and Dr. Starzl shared a Lasker Award, the most prestigious medical award next to the Nobel.
When asked by the New York Times that year if he hoped to receive the Nobel as well, Dr. Calne replied: “I have a patient and it’s been 38 years since his transplant. Just returned from a 150 mile hike biking in the mountains. This 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 at King’s College London, in 1946. Most of his classmates were servicemen returning from World War II, and many were a decade older than him.
Halfway through his studies he was assigned to care for a young patient who was dying of kidney failure. When the patient asked why he couldn’t just get a new kidney, Dr. Calne recalls, senior doctors laughed at him.
“Well, I’ve always tended not to like being told something can’t be done,” he told the Times in 2012.
He graduated in 1952 and then served three years in the army, mostly in Southeast Asia, where Britain’s colonial forces waged guerilla warfare in what is now Malaysia.
He married Patricia Whelan in 1956. Along with their son Russell, she survives him, as does another son, Richard. their daughters, Jane Calne, Debbie Chittenden, Suzie Calne and Sarah Nicholson; 13 grandchildren; and his brother, Donald, a leading expert on Parkinson’s disease.
Dr. Calne returned to Britain in 1956. He combined a series of short-term teaching posts while returning to his medical training and starting his own transplant research.
After Oxford, he worked as a physician at the Royal Free Hospital and received a fellowship at 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 became a professor at Cambridge. He remained there until 1998, when he received honorary status. After his retirement, he devoted more of his time to his other passion, painting.
He often painted his patients—with their consent—and in 1988 took lessons from one of them, the Scottish painter John Belany.
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”.