The Graft: How a Pioneering Operation Sparked the Modern Age of Organ TransplantsIn a community hospital in suburban Chicago run by Catholic nuns, surgeons performed an operation never done in the world before. The team at the Little Company of Mary Hospital led by Richard Lawler transplanted a kidney in 1950 from a just deceased woman into the abdominal cavity of a 44 year old woman. Critics in the medical community called the operation irresponsible because immunosuppressant drugs that prevent the rejection of a transplanted