Joseph Murray

“Service to society is the rent we pay for living on this planet.”

“I was performing skin grafts and became interested in why skin wouldn't graft permanently.”

“I still have a vivid memory of my excitement when I first saw a chart of the periodic table of elements. The order in the universe seemed miraculous.”

“To the patient, any operation is momentous.”

“At heart, I'm a reconstructive surgeon.”

“The slow rejection of the foreign skin grafts fascinated me. How could the host distinguish another person's skin from his own?”

“If you're going to worry about what people say, you're never going to make any progress.”

“You cannot stop the human mind from working.”

“My only wish would be to have 10 more lives to live on this planet. If that were possible, I'd spend one lifetime each in embryology, genetics, physics, astronomy and geology. The other lifetimes would be as a pianist, backwoodsman, tennis player, or writer for the 'National Geographic.'”

“Stem cells are probably going to be extremely useful.”

“Kidney transplants seem so routine now. But the first one was like Lindbergh's flight across the ocean.”

“It's the best time ever to be a doctor because you can heal and treat conditions that were untreatable even a few years ago.”

“Post-operatively the transplanted kidney functioned immediately with a dramatic improvement in the patient's renal and cardiopulmonary status. This spectacular success was a clear demonstration that organ transplantation could be life-saving.”

“Blanket objection is not very reasonable to me - any effort to control scientific advances is doomed to fail.”

“I wanted to be a surgeon, possibly influenced by the qualities of our family doctor who cared for our childhood ailments.”

“Work is a prayer. And I start off every morning dedicating it to our Creator.”