Michael Woodruff

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

Life

Woodruff grew up in Australia after his father, a professor of veterinary medicine, accepted a professorship in Melbourne, except for a school year in England. He first studied electrical engineering and mathematics at the University of Melbourne , but switched to medicine after the third year despite good success (with a bachelor's degree in 1933) because of the better career prospects. 1937 received his MBBS ( Bachelor of Medicine, Bachelor of Surgery ). In 1941 he received his Master of Surgery and joined the Australian Army. During the conquest of Singapore, he was taken prisoner by Japan and was sent to the Changi prison camp in Singapore. In order to prevent malnutrition he developed a method to extract important nutrients from agricultural waste, grass and the like. After returning in 1945 he continued his specialist training as a surgeon in Melbourne, where he also taught pathology.

In 1947 he went to England to take his examination as a Fellow of the Royal College of Surgeons, while teaching at the University of Sheffield. There he also researched tissue rejection in the pathology laboratory, collaborating with Peter Medawar. In 1948 he became 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 became professor of surgery at the University of Edinburgh , where he stayed for the remainder of his career as a surgeon. Among other things, Donald Michie, later known for research on artificial intelligence, was his assistant there. In 1958 he was elected a member of the Royal Society of Edinburgh . In 1976 he retired from the University of Edinburgh. He then spent ten years researching 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 Great Britain, on identical twins in the Edinburgh Royal Infirmary. By his retirement in 1976, he had 126 more kidney transplants.

Among his many studies and experiments on tissue rejection and its reduction was an anti- lymphocyte serum (against the patient's own lymphocytes), which is still used today in rejection reactions after transplants.

In Edinburgh, a transplant center was opened at the Western General Hospital in the late 1960s with support from the Nuffield Foundation. In 1970 it was temporarily closed after a severe hepatitis B epidemic, which also killed several patients and four of the employees.

In 1969 he received the Lister Medal (Lister Oration: Biological Aspects of Individuality ). In 1968 he became a Fellow of the Royal Society , of which he was temporarily vice-president, and in 1969 he was knighted. He was President of the Transplantation Society and Honorary Fellow 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 worked scientifically and with whom he had two sons and a daughter. As a hobby he played tennis and sailing, played the organ and piano and occupied himself with number theory, in which he regularly but in vain tried Fermat's Last Theorem.

Fonts

  • Deficiency Diseases in Japanese Prison Camps . MRC Special Report No. 274. HM Stationary Office, London 1951.
  • Surgery for Dental Students . Blackwell, Oxford 1954 (4th edition with HE Berry 1984)
  • 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.

Web links

Individual evidence

  1. ^ Fellows Directory. Biographical Index: Former RSE Fellows 1783–2002. (PDF file) Royal Society of Edinburgh, accessed April 25, 2020 .
personal data
SURNAME Woodruff, Michael
ALTERNATIVE NAMES Woodruff, Michael Francis Addison (full name)
BRIEF DESCRIPTION British surgeon
DATE OF BIRTH April 3, 1911
PLACE OF BIRTH Mill Hill, London
DATE OF DEATH March 10, 2001
Place of death Edinburgh