Michael Woodruff was a British surgeon and scientist principally remembered for his research into organ transplantation. Though born in London, Woodruff spent his youth in Australia, where he earned degrees in electrical engineering and medicine. Having completed his studies shortly after the outbreak of World War II, he joined the Australian Army Medical Corps, but was soon captured by Japanese forces and imprisoned in the Changi Prison Camp. While there, he devised an ingenious method of extracting nutrients from agricultural wastes to prevent malnutrition among his fellow POWs. At the conclusion of the war, Woodruff returned to Britain and began a long career as an academic surgeon, mixing clinical work and research. By the end of the 1950s, his study of aspects of transplantation biology such as rejection and immunosuppression led to his making the first kidney transplant in the United Kingdom, on October 30, 1960. For this and his other scientific work, Woodruff was elected a Fellow of the Royal Society in 1968 and knighted in 1969. Although retiring from surgical work in 1976, he remained an active figure in the scientific community, researching cancer and serving on the boards of various medical and scientific organizations.

Read the rest of this article: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Michael_Woodruff

_______________________________ Today's selected anniversaries:

1865: Boston Corbett shot and killed John Wilkes Booth, the assassin of U.S. President Abraham Lincoln. (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Boston_Corbett)

1925: Paul von Hindenburg defeated Wilhelm Marx in the second round of the German presidential election, becoming the first directly elected head of state of the Weimar Republic. (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Paul_von_Hindenburg)

1937: Spanish Civil War: The bombing of Guernica in Spain by the Condor Legion of the German Luftwaffe resulted in a devastating firestorm. (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bombing_of_Guernica)

1964: Tanganyika and Zanzibar merged to form Tanzania. (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tanzania)

1986: Chernobyl disaster: A nuclear reactor in Chernobyl, Ukraine suffered a steam explosion, resulting in a fire and a nuclear meltdown. (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chernobyl_disaster)

_____________________ Wikiquote of the day:

They say that each generation inherits from those that have gone before; if this were so there would be no limit to man's improvements or to his power of reaching perfection. But he is very far from receiving intact that storehouse of knowledge which the centuries have piled up before him; he may perfect some inventions, but in others, he lags behind the originators, and a great many inventions have been lost entirely. What he gains on the one hand, he loses on the other. -- Eugène Delacroix (http://en.wikiquote.org/wiki/Eug%C3%A8ne_Delacroix)