Kevin Loughlin
Boston, Massachusetts, United States

My experience with Nobel laureates began on Monday, July 2, 1979. The previous weekend, I had started my urology residency at Peter Bent Brigham Hospital in Boston. The outgoing resident had signed out the urology service to me the evening before and mentioned, “Doctor Harrison has a suprapubic prostatectomy booked for tomorrow morning. If you read up on it and he thinks that you know what you’re doing, he may let you do part of the case.”

The next morning, I met Doctor Harrison in the operating room hallway and introduced myself. His voice and his handshake were as robust as his body habitus. As we walked to one of the porcelain scrub sinks, he introduced me to the chief of plastic surgery, Dr. Joseph Murray. Although it was early in my training, I knew that Doctors Harrison and Murray were the two main surgeons who had performed the first successful human kidney transplant done at Peter Bent Brigham Hospital almost two decades earlier. Thus began my urological surgery career that would span almost four decades and introduce me to some of the most distinguished members of the medical and scientific community.

William Lipscomb    

William Lipscomb was awarded the Nobel Prize in Chemistry in 1976 for his research on the bonding of boron compounds and the general nature of chemical bonding. He was born in Cleveland, Ohio, and received a BS in chemistry from the University of Kentucky in 1941 and a PhD from the California Institute of Technology in 1946. From 1946 to 1959 he taught at the University of Minnesota, and he came to Harvard in 1959.

I first met Professor Lipscomb in 1987 when he was referred to me because of an abnormal prostate exam. He was gregarious but unassuming, and we developed a warm friendship. He told me of his interest in insects, rocks, and minerals as a child and how he and his friends would send messages to each other in Morse code. Receiving a Gilbert chemistry set as a present at the age of twelve was a seminal event of his childhood. Aside from his lifelong interest in science, he was an enthusiastic musician who regularly played the clarinet in concerts. He would always arrive for his visits wearing his signature string tie.

When I wrote a book on prostate specific antigen (PSA) and its use as a biomarker, he gave me the honor of writing the Forward.¹ He mentioned in it that I had performed his radical prostatectomy on May 6, 1988. I am happy to say that the surgery was successful and he lived until 2011, when he died at the age of ninety-one from pneumonia.

Dudley Herschbach

Dudley Herschbach was awarded the Nobel Prize in Chemistry jointly with Yuan T. Lee and John C. Polanyi for their work on the dynamics of chemical elementary processes. Like Lipscomb, Herschbach was gregarious, and his baritone voice filled the room. I learned that he had received both football and academic scholarships at Stanford as well as a BS in mathematics in 1954 and MS in chemistry in 1955. He later received a doctorate in chemical physics in 1958 at Harvard.

His academic career began at the University of California at Berkeley, but in 1963 he returned to Harvard where he remained for the rest of his career. He had a lifelong interest in Benjamin Franklin, writing and lecturing extensively about him. His enthusiasm for Franklin was palpable. To me, that attraction was due to their shared boundless curiosity for so many aspects of science. He reveled in recounting the expanse of Franklin’s investigations of electricity, his invention of bifocals and design of modernized streetlights, and the establishment of lending libraries. I think Dudley was fascinated by Franklin because they were so much alike. Dudley is still alive at age ninety-two.

Thomas H. Weller

Thomas H. Weller was born in Ann Arbor, Michigan, in 1915. He was educated in public schools there and studied at the University of Michigan, where his father was a physician in the pathology department. After completing his bachelor’s and master’s degrees at the University of Michigan, he earned his medical degree from Harvard in 1940. He served in the Army Medical Corps during World War II and in 1947 returned to Harvard Medical School to work with John Enders at Boston Children’s Hospital. He soon became part of the research team that studied the isolation and growth of the polio virus in tissue, which contributed to the development of the polio vaccine. Weller, Enders, and Frederick C. Robbins were awarded the Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine for their work in 1954.

I met Professor Weller in the late 1980s. He had been a patient of my chief Ben Gittes, who transferred his care to me when he left Boston in 1987. As his disease required regular cystoscopic examinations, he visited me every three months for several years. Aside from his quiet reserve, what I found remarkable was the shared devotion between him and his wife, who accompanied him on his many visits. His urologic problems were managed successfully, and he died of unrelated causes at the age of ninety-three. His wife died a few months later.

Joseph Murray

Doctor Joseph Murray was never my patient, but he was a mentor and a friend. He won the Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine in 1990 jointly with Edward Donnell Thomas for his work on renal transplantation. He was born in Milford, Massachusetts and graduated from Holy Cross College in 1940 and Harvard Medical School in 1943. Toward the end of his internship year at Peter Bent Brigham Hospital, he was drafted into military service and was stationed at Valley Forge General Hospital, a major plastic surgery center in Pennsylvania. By happenstance, he became involved in the care of a twenty-two-year-old pilot, Charles Woods, who had sustained burns over 70% of his body, including his face and hands, while flying a fuel transport plane over India.² Murray was involved in performing twenty-four operations on Woods. These were skin grafts that survived long enough before being rejected to permit Woods’ own healthy skin to be harvested and used as autografts to cover the burned areas.

This serendipitous exposure led Murray to his two career passions: organ transplantation and reconstructive plastic surgery. After the war, when he returned to Boston, many physicians still thought that organ transplantation of any type would not be feasible because of immunologic rejection. In fact, during his Nobel speech, Murray recalled that while many scientists were pessimistic about the feasibility of human transplantation, he had remained optimistic.³

Joseph Murray and Hartwell Harrison were involved in the first successful human kidney transplant performed at Peter Bent Brigham Hospital on December 23, 1954. The transplantation was performed between two identical twins, so immunologic rejection was not an issue. However, this surgical success paved the way for the era of organ transplantation that followed. Murray went on to collaborate with British researcher Roy Calne in using early immunosuppressive drugs such as 6-mercaptopurine and azathioprine to permit transplantation between unrelated people.

Murray continued to be involved in renal transplantation during the first part of his career. However, from 1972 to 1985, he served as chief of plastic surgery at Boston Children’s Hospital where he focused on facial reconstruction in children with congenital deformities. In many ways, facial reconstruction was his true passion. Francis D. Moore, the chairman of surgery at Peter Bent Brigham Hospital, said, “Joe’s the only guy who ever won a Nobel Prize for pursuing a hobby.”⁴

Murray concluded his Nobel acceptance speech with the following words:

We have been blessed in our lives beyond my wildest dreams. My only wish would be to have ten more lives to live on this planet. If that were possible, I’d spend one lifetime each in embryology, genetics, physics, astronomy and geology. The other lifetimes would be as a pianist, backwoods man, tennis player or writer for the National Geographic. If anyone has bothered to read this far, you would note that I still have one future life to be accounted for. That is because I’d like to keep open the option for another life as a surgeon scientist.⁵

Conclusion

These four men were remarkable not only for their scientific achievements, but for their inherent curiosity and humility. Robert and Michele Root-Bernstein have analyzed the traits of Nobel laureates and found that many of them were creative polymaths.⁶ They had the ability to purposely integrate  formal and informal expertise from widely varied disciplines to form new ideas and practices. Lipscomb and Murray were both lifelong musicians. Herschbach was an accomplished historian, given his recognized expertise on Ben Franklin. And Tom Weller developed an avocation in parasitology, in which he published and taught. He also consulted for the World Health Organization on a variety of infectious diseases throughout South America, the Middle East, and Africa.

I was fortunate to know these four men and to call them my friends.

References

1. Loughlin KR. Clinical Guide to Prostate Specific Antigen, Springer 2004, Forward William Lipscomb.
2. Tan SY and Merchant J. “Joseph Murray (1919-2012), First Transplant Surgeon.” Singapore Med J. 2019; 60(4):162-3.
3. Joseph E. Murray – Facts. NobelPrize.org.  nobelprize.org/prizes/medicine/1990/murray/biographical/. Accessed August 15, 2024.
4. Tan and Merchant, “Joseph Murray.”
5. Nobelprize.org, “Joseph E. Murray.”
6. Root-Bernstein R and Root-Bernstein M. “What do Nobel Prize winners have in common? They’re creative polymaths.” Innovation, October 7, 2022. siliconrepublic.com/innovation/nobel-prize-winners-creative-polymaths. Accessed August 17, 2024.