Joseph Murray Quotations

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

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

Its the best time ever to be a doctor because you can heal and treat conditions that were untreatable even a few years ago.

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

I tell [medical students] that they are the luckiest persons on earth to be in medical school, and to forget all this worry about H.M.O.'s and keep your eye on helping the patient. It's the best time ever to be a doctor because you can heal and treat conditions that were untreatable even a couple of years ago.

Stem cells are probably going to be extremely useful. But it isn't a given, and even if it were, I don't think the end justifies the means. I am not against stem cells, I think it's great. Blanket objection is not very reasonable to me-any effort to control scientific advances is doomed to fail. You cannot stop the human mind from working.

I've never regretted a swim

It is probably no exaggeration to suppose that in order to improve such an organ as the eye at all, it must be improved in ten different ways at once. And the improbability of any complex organ being produced and brought to perfection in any such way is an improbability of the same kind and degree as that of producing a poem or a mathematical demonstration by throwing letters at random on a table.

And I start off every morning dedicating it to our Creator.

You cannot stop the human mind from working.