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Michael Woodruff

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   Sir Michael Francis Addison Woodruff FRS ( April 3, 1911 – March 10,
   2001) was a British surgeon and scientist. Though born in London,
   Woodruff spent his youth in Australia where he attended college and
   received a medical degree. Woodruff finished his medical studies
   shortly after the outbreak of World War II, and joined the Australian
   Army Medical Corps, but was soon captured by Japanese forces and
   imprisoned in the Changi Prison Camp. While imprisoned, Woodruff
   devised an ingenious method of extracting nutrients from agricultural
   wastes to prevent malnutrition among his fellow POWs.

   At the conclusion of the war, Woodruff returned to Britain and began a
   long career as an academic surgeon, mixing clinical work and research.
   Over the course of several decades, Woodruff studied transplant
   rejection, immunosuppression, and other aspects of transplantation
   biology. His considerable contributions to the science of
   transplantation culminated on October 30, 1960 when he performed the
   first kidney transplant in the United Kingdom. For this and his other
   scientific contributions, Woodruff was selected as a Fellow of the
   Royal Society in 1968 and knighted in 1969. Unwilling to rest on his
   laurels, Woodruff continued his surgical work until retiring in 1976,
   and even continued to be active in the scientific community for many
   years aftwerward, researching cancer and serving on the boards of
   various medical and scientific organizations.

Early life

   Michael Woodruff was born on April 3, 1911 in Mill Hill, 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, Margaret, 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.
   While at the University, he passed the primary exam for the Royal
   College of Surgeons in 1934. He finished the program in 1937 and
   received an MBBS with honours as well as 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 II

   At the outbreak of World War II, 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 Harbour, a Japanese offensive resulted in
   his capture.
   A chapel built by Australian POWs at the Changi Prison Camp where
   Woodruff was held during World War II.
   Enlarge
   A chapel built by Australian POWs at the Changi Prison Camp where
   Woodruff was held during World War II.

   After being captured, 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, soya beans, rice polishings, 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".

   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 FRCS 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 space for him in its surgical lab. Instead, Woodruff was given a
   place in the pathology laboratory where he studied transplant
   rejection, a process in which the immune system of a transplant
   recipient attacks the transplanted tissue. Woodruff was particularly
   interested in thyroid allografts to the anterior chamber of the eye
   because they did not appear to meet with rejection.

   Woodruff's work with the allografts gave him a solid basis to work in
   the developing field of transplantion and rejection. To further himself
   in these areas, Woodruff arranged to meet Peter Medawar, an eminent
   zoologist and important pioneer in the study of rejection. The two men
   discussed transplantation and rejection, beginning a lasting
   professional relationship. Despite his achievements at Sheffield,
   Woodruff applied for a post at the Royal Melbourne Hospital but was
   rejected.

Aberdeen

   In 1948, shortly after applying for the position in Melbourne, 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. He took advantage of this access and his wife's
   skills as a lab assistant to investigate in utero grafts (tissue grafts
   performed while the recipient was still in the womb). At the time, the
   surgical community hypothesized that if a recipient were given in utero
   grafts, he would be able to receive tissue from the donor later in life
   without risk of rejection. Woodruff's experiments with rats, 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. As part of his blood antigen studies, Woodruff
   found two volunteers with identical blood antigens and arranged for
   them to exchange skin grafts. When the grafts were rejected, Woodruff
   determined that rejection must be controlled by additional factors.

Dunedin

   The University of Otago Dunedin School of Medicine where Woodruff
   worked from 1953 to 1957
   Enlarge
   The University of Otago Dunedin School of Medicine where Woodruff
   worked from 1953 to 1957

   In 1953, Woodruff moved to Dunedin to take up a position as the Chair
   of Surgery at the University of Otago Dunedin School of Medicine, New
   Zealand's only medical school at that time. While in Dunedin, Woodruff
   conducted research on the use of leucocytes (white blood cells) to
   increase tolerance for allografts in rats. This line of research proved
   to be largely unsuccessful, 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 ( graft versus host disease).

Edinburgh

   A diagram illustrating a typical kidney transplant such as the ones
   Woodruff performed in Edinburgh
   Enlarge
   A diagram illustrating a typical kidney transplant such as the ones
   Woodruff performed in Edinburgh

   In 1957, Woodruff was appointed to the Chair of Surgical Science at the
   University of Edinburgh. At the university, 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 (the body's acceptance of tissues, as opposed to rejection),
   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. Woodruff had been waiting for
   the right patient for some time, hoping to find a patient with an
   identical twin to act as the donor as this would significantly reduce
   the risk of rejection. The patient that Woodruff eventually found was a
   49 year old man suffering from severely impaired kidney function who
   received one of his identical 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 and one of
   seven books he wrote.

   Woodruff retired from the University of Edinburgh in 1976 and joined
   the MRC Clinical and Population Cytogenetics Unit. He spent the next
   ten years there, engaged in cancer research with an emphasis on tumor
   immunology. During that time, Woodruff also published 25 papers and two
   books. After retiring from his cancer research, Woodruff lived quietly
   with his wife in Edinburgh, traveling occasionally until his death on
   March 10, 2001 at the age of 89.

Importance

   Woodruff’s contributions to surgery were important and long-lasting. In
   addition to performing the first kidney transplant in the UK, he
   devised a method of implanting a transplanted ureter in the bladder
   during transplants that is still used today. Furthermore, he
   established a large, efficient transplant unit in Edinburgh that
   remains one of the world’s best. Although best known for these clinical
   accomplishments, Woodruff’s contributions to the study of rejection and
   tolerance induction were equally important. Among these contributions,
   Woodruff's work with anti-lymphocyte serum has led to its wide use to
   reduce rejection symptoms in organ transplant recipients up to the
   current day.

   These important contributions to medicine and biology were first
   seriously honored in 1968 when Woodruff was elected to be a Fellow of
   the Royal Society. The next year, 1969, Woodruff was knighted by the
   Queen, a rare accomplishment for a surgeon. Additionally, numerous
   medical organizations gave Woodruff honorary membership, including the
   American College of Surgeons, the American Surgical Association, and
   the Royal College of Physicians of Edinburgh. Woodruff also held office
   in several scientific organizations, serving as Vice-President of the
   Royal Society and President of The Transplantation Society. Finally,
   Woodruff served, for many years, as a WHO advisor and as a visiting
   professor at a number of universities.

Publications

   Woodruff's impact is also apparent in his large volume of publications.
   In addition to over authoring over 200 scholarly papers, Woodruff wrote
   seven books during his career, covering numerous aspects of medicine
   and surgery.
     * Deficiency Diseases in Japanese Prison Camps. M.R.C Special Report
       No. 274. H.M. Stationary Office, London 1951.
     * Surgery for Dental Students. Blackwell, Oxford. (Fourth Ed., 1984
       with H.E. Berry) 1954.
     * The Transplantation of Tissues and Organs. Charles C. Thomas.
       Springfield, Illinois 1960.
     * The One and the Many: Edwin Stevens Lectures for the Laity. Royal
       Society of Medicine, London 1970.
     * On Science and Surgery. Edinburgh University Press, Edinburgh 1976.
     * The Interaction of Cancer and Host: Its Therapeutic Significance.
       Grune Stratton, New York 1980.
     * Cellular Variation and Adaptation in Cancer: Biological Basis and
       Therapeutic Consequences. Oxford University Press 1990.

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