[The history of transplantation]

Transplantation is a young discipline with a long history, of which this paper therefore only describes fragments. The story is created by the pioneers, who made the basis for transplantation. I have focused on those who received the Nobel prize for their work, Carrel (1912), Burnet, Medawar (1960), Snell, Dausset, Benacerraf (1980), Elion, Hitchings (1988), and Thomas and Murray (1990), however many others deserve to be mentioned. Parallelled with the development of transplantation, other disciplines like immunology have grown up. Today we can transplant kidneys, hearts, livers, and bone marrow as a kind of routine. However we do treat on the brink of medicine, and the suppression of the immune apparatus has a prize, which is a tendency to atherosclerosis, virus infections and malignancies.