David Pegg obituary
by Colin Green from on (#4SK6Q)
Clinical scientist and academic who pioneered groundbreaking cooling techniques for use in organ transplantation
In the early days of organ transplantation one of the thorniest problems facing medical science was how to keep an organ functional in the period between harvesting it from a donor and inserting it into a grateful recipient. David Pegg, who has died aged 86, did much towards solving that conundrum, and so enabled us to take for granted our capacity to stop the clock of life by freezing or cooling an organ before restarting its normal function.
One of the pioneers in the field of low temperature biology - building on the work of Audrey Smith, Christopher Polge and Peter Mazur - David made perhaps his greatest contribution through research into the preservation of human kidneys, which he began in 1965.
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