Canadian Society of Transplantation Lifetime Achievement Award

Dr. Ron Moore

Urology surgeon-scientist Dr. Ron Moore has won The Canadian Society of Transplantation Lifetime Achievement Award for his contribution to developing transplantation activities nationally and internationally. Few surgeons have been awarded it. After being involved in transplantation research for over 30 years, he won it for research, training and development and involvement with the CST: Dr. Moore helped the CST develop the standards for transplantation.

When he first started at the University of Alberta there had only been 790 kidney transplantations in Edmonton: throughout his career, Dr. Moore performed more than 1,000.

He received the award at the Fairmont Hotel in Winnipeg, at the CST annual meeting in October. The first time Dr. Moore was involved in the CST was when he thought that there was an opportunity missed for people to become an organ donor. The criteria for donation eligibility were only met when the heart stops. He suggested that when the brain dies, there’s no recovery, expanding the pool for organ donors, according to the Edmonton Journal, which featured the award.

“I was an advocate for developing a donation following cardiac death as opposed to neurological determination death. So, when transplantation first started, a person would have to have had his heart stopped before they could be used as an organ donor. And then as science evolved, it became that you had to be neurologically dead,” he told the Edmonton Journal.

“They had means of testing that, that your brain wasn’t working, and that you would never recover from that. And not all patients would reach brain death criteria, but they still wouldn’t survive if they were taken off life support. And so there was an opportunity missed to become an organ donor.”

Dr. Moore's contribution to the CST bridged the gap between waiting times for recipients, and available donor organs. “Those people wait and die waiting on a waiting list, because there’s not enough organs to go around,” he said.  “And so, to expand the donor pool, to help those people and to make good out of bad situation, because people that sign up for donation, they want to donate their organs,” he told the Edmonton Journal.