The Body as System

Richard Herrick was dying. His kidneys had failed, and in 1954 there was no treatment. Surgeons had tried transplanting kidneys, but the immune system always rejected the foreign organ. Patients survived days, maybe a week, then died.

But Richard had an advantage: an identical twin. Ronald's kidney wouldn't be foreign -- it would be self. On December 23, 1954, at Brigham Hospital in Boston, surgeon Joseph Murray removed a kidney from Ronald and transplanted it into Richard. The kidney began producing urine almost immediately.

Richard lived eight more years. Got married, had two children, died in 1963 from a heart attack -- not kidney failure. The transplant proved that organs could be swapped, that the body was modular, that failing parts could be replaced. The human body wasn't sealed. It was a system.

The problem was compatibility. Identical twins were rare. Researchers spent the next decade trying to suppress the immune system without killing the patient. By the 1980s, drugs like cyclosporine made transplants viable for non-twin donors. Kidneys, hearts, livers, lungs -- all became swappable parts.

cross section of a human kidney showing its internal anatomy — the organ at the center of the 1954 transplant breakthrough. source: wikimedia commons

Transplantation raised questions still unanswered. Who gets an organ when supply is limited? Should organs be bought and sold? Thousands die waiting every year. Just as Newton's laws governed motion, supply and demand govern who lives and dies in the transplant system.

Today, researchers work on growing organs in labs, printing them with 3D printers, editing genes to make animal organs compatible. Transplantation was the first step -- proof that the body could be treated as an engineered system, that biology was not destiny. It turned medicine into a design problem.