Interviews

1. Difference between experiences of youth and older people in WWII camps

2. His experiences in Chicago after WWII

3. Finding a way to keep donor kidneys longer in order to ship to matched patients

4. Creating a registry to study the outcome of transplants

5. Using tissue typing and blood tests to determine paternity

6. Developing the tray used in determining HLA types for tissue typing

7. The HLA and transplantation history books

8. Developing the micro test was the most important accomplishment

9. Continuing to work to improve transplanting success

Terasaki,Paul

(b.1929) Pioneer medical researcher in tissue transfer and organ transplantation.

Finding a way to keep donor kidneys longer in order to ship to matched patients

We wanted to have successful transplants. In order to get there, there’s many things that we had to solve. One of the interesting projects was to figure out how to keep a kidney so that it could be shipped to the matched patient. See, we saw that in Los Angeles, even with this large population, oftentimes when we have a kidney from a donor, it wouldn’t match anybody in Los Angeles. So we knew from that time, that throughout the United States, we had to have a system of shipping kidneys. And that’s the reason why I spent a lot of effort trying to make a solution that we could put into the donor kidneys and have the donor kidneys survive for a long time—at least two days. This was our objective. So once we got that kind of a solution, it became possible to ship kidneys from one city to another. And today, as many as more than 10,000 kidneys have been shipped in the United States to matched patients.

Date: February 10, 2004

Location: California, US

Interviewer: Gwenn M. Jensen

Contributed by: Watase Media Arts Center, Japanese American National Museum.

Interviewee Bio

Paul Terasaki, born in 1929, is a UCLA Medical Professor Emeritus and a pioneer in tissue transfer research who continues to speak globally on tissue typing and organ transplantation. In 1991 he edited a volume entitled History of Transplantation: Thirty-five Recollections.

He and his wife Hisako, a renowned painter, take a strong interest in U.S.-Japan relations and the affairs of the Japanese American community. Together they established an endowment at the UCLA Asian American Studies Center to fund fellowships for UCLA graduate students from Japan pursuing research on the historical and contemporary experiences and issues of the Japanese American population. Additionally, a Paul I. Terasaki Endowed Chair in U.S.-Japan Relations supports a distinguished teaching program designed to bring experts in the field of Japanese studies and U.S.-Japan relations to UCLA. (February 10, 2004)