Sir Roy Calne FRS

Sir Roy Calne was a pioneering transplant surgeon who performed several first transplant operations in Europe and the world, including the first liver transplant operation in Europe in 1968 and the world's first liver, heart, and lung transplant in 1987.

He was Harkness Fellow at Harvard Medical School from 1960-61 and Professor of Surgery at Cambridge University between 1965 and 1968; much of his subsequent work was on the improvement of immuno-suppression techniques to prolong the life of liver transplant recipients. He was the Yeah Ghim Professor of Surgery at the National University of Singapore.

He was elected to the Royal Society in 1974 and knighted in 1986. He was also a member of artists’ group Group 90. You can see the National Portrait Gallery’s portraits of Sir Roy here. In 2003 he was one of the signatories to a letter supporting a holiday on Charles Darwin’s birthday, published in The Times on February 12, and also sent to the Prime Minister and the Home Secretary. Later, he contributed “Population, religion and homo extinctus”, a blunt appraisal of humanity’s long term prospects to the website Humanist Life.