Tuesday 15 July 2014

This essayist is attributed for the discipline of nephrology, was the first one to perform renal transplant too!!!

Jean Hamburger (15 July 1909 – 1 February 1992) was a French physician, surgeon and essayist. He is particularly known for his contribution to nephrology, and for having performed the first renal transplantation in France in 1952. Hamburger was born to a Jewish family in Paris. Together with René Kuss, Hamburger defined the precise methods and rules for conducting renal transplantation surgery, and is attributed with founding the medical discipline of nephrology. 

In 1952, at Necker Hospital in Paris, he performed the first successful renal transplant surgery between living patients in France, on a 16-year-old carpenter, Marius Renard who damaged his only kidney when he fell off scaffolding, using a kidney donated by the subject's mother. The organ failed, but rejection was staved off for three weeks, a record at the time. 

In 1955, he created the very first articifial kidney. Hamburger is credited with major breakthroughs in renal transplants: first prolonged success in 1953, first unqualified success between twins in 1959 and non-twins in 1962. He also authored basic research on the immunological basis of kidney disease, graft immunology and auto-immune diseases.

Hamburger married concert pianist Annette Haas, and had 3 children, Michel, Bernard and Françoise. In the 1950s, Hamburger contracted a lung infection which weakened him severely. Hamburger was the father of the well-known French singer-songwriter, Michel Berger. Hamburger died on 1 February 1992 in Paris.


Kidney transplantation or renal transplantation is the organ transplant of a kidney into a patient with end-stage renal disease. Kidney transplantation is typically classified as deceased-donor (formerly known as cadaveric) or living-donor transplantation depending on the source of the donor organ. Living-donor renal transplants are further characterized as genetically related (living-related) or non-related (living-unrelated) transplants, depending on whether a biological relationship exists between the donor and recipient. Exchanges and chains are a novel approach to expand the living donor pool.