Organ transplantation is an exceptional success story of modern medicine. From
1954, when Joseph E. Murray conducted the first living kidney donation among
twins, to 2013, when 6866 transplants1 were conducted within the Eurotransplant2
region, the new discipline of transplantation medicine has been confronted with a
long list of different challenges and obstacles. In the beginning, medical difficulties
were in the foreground, e.g. tissue typing or the matching of donors and suitable recipients.
One of the major problems, the allogeneic rejection caused by antigen differences,
was able to be solved in the course of the 1950s. Due to the groundbreaking
discovery of the French hematologist Jean Dausset, who in 1958 discovered that
Human Leukocyte Antigens (HLA) function as body markers indicating whether a
tissue is own or foreign, it became possible to develop immunosuppressive drugs
which counteract rejection. Based on the development of more specific and effective
immunosuppressants, transplantation technology could expand. Thereby the 1960s
became the decade of transplantation success with the first post-mortem kidney
transplantation in 1962, the first liver and lung transplantations in 1963, followed by
the first pancreas and the first heart transplantations in 1966 and 1967