Michael Woodruff

Michael Francis Addison Woodruff ( born April 3, 1911 in Mill Hill, London, † March 10, 2001 in Edinburgh ) was a British surgeon.

Life

Woodruff grew after his father, a professor of veterinary medicine, a professor in Melbourne had accepted, in Australia, of a school year in England except. He studied electrical engineering and mathematics at the University of Melbourne, but switched after the third year, despite good successes ( with bachelor degrees in 1933 ) because of better job prospects for medicine. 1937 received his MBBS (Bachelor of Medicine, Bachelor of Surgery ). In 1941 he received his Master of Surgery and went into the Australian Army. At the conquest of Singapore, he fell into Japanese captivity and came to the Changi prison camp in Singapore. To prevent malnutrition, he developed a method of important nutrients from agricultural waste, grass and extract the like. After his return in 1945 he continued his medical training as a surgeon in Melbourne, where he incidentally taught pathology.

In 1947 he went to England to lay his examination as a Fellow of the Royal College of Surgeons, and also taught at the University of Sheffield. There he conducted research in the laboratory of pathology at tissue rejection, and it became a collaboration with Peter Medawar kam.1948 it. Senior lecturer at the University of Aberdeen and in 1953 he became professor of surgery at the University of Otago in Dunedin, New Zealand In 1957 he was finally professor of surgery at the University of Edinburgh, where he remained for the rest of his career as a surgeon. There was, among others, the later research into artificial intelligence known Donald Michie his assistant. In 1976 he went to the University of Edinburgh in retirement. He continued his research after another ten years in tumor immunology at the Clinical and Population Cytogenetics Unit of the Medical Research Council.

On October 30, 1960, he performed the first kidney transplant in the UK, on identical twins in the Edinburgh Royal Infirmary. Until his retirement in 1976 was followed by 126 more kidney transplants.

Among his many studies and experiments on tissue rejection and their reduction and an anti - lymphocyte serum was ( against their own lymphocytes of patients), which is still used in organ rejection after transplants.

In Edinburgh in the late 1960s with support from the Nuffield Foundation, a transplant center was opened at the Western General Hospital. 1970, it has since been recovering from a serious hepatitis B epidemic, which also includes several patients and four of the employees fell victim temporarily closed.

In 1969 he was awarded the Lister Medal ( Lister Oration: Biological Aspects of Individuality ). He became a Fellow of the Royal Society, whose vice-president, he was temporarily in 1968 and 1969 he was knighted. He was president of the Transplantation Society and honorary member of the American College of Surgeons, the American Surgical Association and the Royal College of Physicians of Edinburgh.

In 1946, he married Hazel Ashby, with whom he also collaborated scientifically and with whom he had two sons and a daughter. As a hobby he pursued tennis, sailing, played the organ and piano and worked on number theory, in which he regularly but in vain to Fermat's last theorem tried.

Writings

Deficiency Diseases in Japanese Prison Camps. M.R.C Special Report No. 274 H. M. Stationery Office, London 1951.
Surgery for Dental Students. Blackwell, Oxford, 1954 ( 4th edition with HE Berry 1984)
The transplantation of tissues and organ, 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.
Cellular Variation and Adaptation in Cancer: Biological and Therapeutic Consequences base. Oxford University Press 1990.

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