Hello, I'm Krestey Young, and this is a podcast from the Desert Island Discs archive.

For rights reasons, we've had to shorten the music.

The program was originally broadcast in 2002, and the presenter was Sue Lolly. My castaway this week is a surgeon. Born in Australia in the 1930s, he assumed family responsibilities early.

When he was an adolescent, his father died of a heart attack, and shortly afterwards his younger brother was killed

and his mother seriously injured in a car accident. Driven therefore by a sense of purpose

he decided on a medical career which coupled with a naturally inquisitive mind led him

into the world of transplant surgery.

At the age of 40 he was invited to Oxford to become the Nuffield Professor of Surgery. He accepted on one condition that the city be given a transplant unit.

Today, that unit is a world leader and the professor who insisted on its creation, one of the world's great pioneers in the tricky

but crucial world of organ transplants. There has to be more to surgery he said

than just seeing patients and operating on them. Now the president of the Royal College of

Surgeons he is Sir Peter Morris.

Sir Peter, you performed your last operation some six months ago but I wonder if I can take you back do you remember your

first transplant operation at Oxford? Well I do indeed it was January the

29th 1975 and two kidneys became available from a donor who had died in the Oxford region

and the family very graciously gave permission for the kidneys to be retrieved.

And the first patient was Jeffrey Slade and we transplanted

him, I think it was about 10 o'clock on that night, and then went on to do the second

patient, Ellen Newy, after midnight, so the next day,

January the 30 of somewhere about 2 o'clock in the morning,

and they were the first two kidney transplants.

And they were successful?

...