Jean Hamburger

In the 1950s, Hamburger contracted a lung infection which weakened him severely. He died on 1 February 1992 in Paris. Just six months later, on 2 August 1992, his son Michel Berger died suddenly of a massive heart attack.

He was elected to life membership to Seat 4 of the Académie française on 18 April 1985, succeeding Pierre Emmanuel, in an official ceremony which took place on 16 January 1986. Upon his death, Cardinal Albert Decourtray was elected to fill his seat on 1 July 1993.

Hamburger was born to a Jewish family in Paris. Together with René Kuss, Hamburger defined the precise methods and rules for conducting renal transplantation surgery and is attributed with founding the medical discipline of nephrology. In 1952, at Necker Hospital in Paris, he performed the first successful renal transplant surgery in France, on a 16-year-old carpenter, Marius Renard who damaged his only kidney when he fell off scaffolding, using a kidney donated by the subject's mother. The organ failed, but the rejection was staved off for three weeks, a record at the time. In 1955, he created the very first artificial kidney. Hamburger is credited with major breakthroughs in renal transplants: first prolonged success in 1953, first unqualified success between twins in 1959 and non-twins in 1962. He also authored basic research on the immunological basis of kidney disease, graft immunology and auto-immune diseases.

Jean Hamburger (15 July 1909 – 1 February 1992) was a French physician, surgeon and essayist. He is particularly known for his contribution to nephrology, and for having performed the first renal transplantation in France in 1952.