A man who donated a kidney in 1954 in the world's first human organ transplant that resulted in long-term survival has died in Maine, his family said.
Ronald Herrick, 79, died this week in Augusta, Maine, in a rehabilitation center where he was recuperating from heart surgery in October, The Boston Globe reported.
On Dec. 23, 1954 in Boston, Dr. Joseph Murray removed a kidney from Ronald and implanted it in Ronald's twin brother, Richard, in a groundbreaking transplant procedure that would eventually bring Murray a Nobel Prize.
Ronald's kidney gave Richard eight more years of life. Previous transplant recipients had lived for only a few months at best.
"It was just one of those things that was kind of out of this world, I thought," Herrick, a math teacher who retired in 1997, told National Public Radio in 2004 on the 50th anniversary of the transplant.
"It was something that hadn't been done before, you knew nothing about it," he said. "So I thought about it a long time. ... My stomach was churning many a morning going to school."
Herrick is survived by his wife, Cynthia, an older brother and a younger sister, the Globe reported.