In 1954, Richard Herrick had just returned home to Massachusetts from serving in the Coast Guard. But instead of enjoying his homecoming with friends and family, Herrick was hospitalized with kidney disease. At the time, the diagnosis meant his days were numbered.

But before the 23-year-old Herrick could even begin to accept his fate, his doctor, Dr. David Miller, thought of the research being done by a group of physicians and scientists at a hospital and the Harvard Medical School nearby. The group was working to figure out how to transplant healthy kidneys into individuals who suffered from organ failure. In fact, the physicians were looking for a potential candidate just like Herrick for the first procedure — the patient happened to have a twin brother.

Herrick was lucky to have Miller as his physician. After all, many medical professionals were vocal skeptics of the physicians researching organ transplantation. One doctor went as far as calling the group at Harvard “a bunch of fools” for their interest in the effort. These “fools” were led by Dr. Joseph Murray, a young surgeon and professor at Harvard Medical School.

Upon graduating from medical school, Murray was drafted and spent World War II working at a hospital in Pennsylvania. That’s where he first worked on transplanting skin tissue on many burn victims and spent a lot of time thinking about tissue rejection. His experience showed him that skin grafting rejection was nearly non-existent when the transplant came from a patient’s relative.

After the war, Murray returned to Massachusetts to work with an enthusiastic doctor studying kidney transplantation at the Surgical Research Lab at Harvard Medical School. Much progress was made, but the potential for the body rejecting a transplanted organ as a foreign object was an outstanding problem. However, Murray hypothesized that transplanting organs between twins would avoid this issue, as his experience with skin tissue transplants had shown.

By the mid-1950s, Murray and his team believed that a successful operation would be technically feasible. Two days before Christmas in 1954, Richard Herrick was brought into one of the operating rooms at the Peter and Bent Brigham Hospital (now known as Brigham and Women’s Hospital). The surgery took about five and a half hours. As Murray predicted, Herrick’s body did not reject his twin’s organ, and he lived for eight more years. After the successful surgery, Murray went on to perform nearly 20 other kidney transplantations among other twins.

Although Herrick’s operation went well, Murray and his team still faced the problem of organ rejection among non-related patients. The physicians tried various strategies, such as X-rays and drugs to suppress the immune system to prevent the body from rejecting the new organ. For years, nothing the physicians tried worked, but Murray was encouraged to continue searching for a solution by the hospital’s clinical staff and leadership.

In 1962, the physicians finally had a breakthrough. Murray’s team partnered with Burroughs-Wellcome, a company that developed Imuran, a drug aimed at helping the body accept an organ transplant. The drug was successfully tested on a patient named Mel Doucette, who received a kidney donation from a stranger. The drug paved the way for additional research and other organ transplantation procedures.

Murray’s pioneering research and work earned him a 1990 Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine. Later, Murray told a relative that he believed he didn’t really have to work to win the Nobel Prize — he was just doing what was right for his patients. Thanks to the perseverance of Murray and his team, nearly 17,000 Americans safely undergo a kidney transplantation procedure every year. The organ can come from an unrelated, or even a deceased donor, and add years to another person’s life.