William P. Murphy Jr.

William P. Muprhy Jr.
Murphy on his 100 ton steam ship.
Born	(1923-11-11) November 11, 1923 (age 93) Boston, Massachusetts, U.S.
Citizenship	United States
Occupation	Medical Doctor, inventor, CEO
Parent(s)	William Parry Murphy Harriett Adams

William P. Murphy Jr. (born November 11, 1923) is a medical doctor and inventor of medical devices including collaborating on a flexible sealed blood bag used for blood transfusions. He is the son of the American physician William Parry Murphy who shared the Nobel Prize in Physiology for Medicine in 1934, and Harriett Adams, the first licensed female dentist in Massachusetts. In 2017 his company, U.S. Stem Cell, faced controversy for unregulated, patient-funded research which was reported to cause blindness in multiple patients.

Murphy graduated from Harvard University in 1946 with a major in pre-medicine and a minor in architecture. He received his M.D. in 1947 from the University of Illinois and also studied physiologic instrumentation at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology from 1947 to 1948.

Murphy practiced medicine for a short time as an intern at St. Francis Hospital in Honolulu and later, at Peter Bent Brigham Hospital in Boston (now Brigham & Women’s Hospital). While at St. Francis, he developed his first medical invention—a projector for presenting full-size x-rays to large audiences. Murphy and the other interns were regularly required to show x-rays of their patients to doctors. To simplify this task, Murphy created a projector that was capable of showing a full-size x-ray on the screen and was easy to use—quite an accomplishment at that time, since a prompt means for converting x-rays to transparencies did not exist.

Murphy's next contribution to the medical world coincided with the Korean War. The U.S. Army first came to Murphy while he was working with a team of doctors in Boston on the first dialysis machines, a program the Army supported because of concerns over exposure to radiation from the Atomic bomb. An offshoot of this work was the refinement of flexible bags to contain blood during transfusions, which offered many advantages to previously used bottles. Developed with Carl Walter, the bags preserve red blood cells and proteins and ensure that the contents are not exposed to air. In 1952, Murphy joined the U.S. Public Health Service as a blood transfusion consultant, and went to Korea to perform transfusions on soldiers injured in battle.