• Surgeon Richard Carlton Lillehei, 1927
  

Richard Lillehei was born in 1927 in Minneapolis, the son of a dentist. He completed his medical studies at the University of Minnesota in 1948. He earned his doctorate in 1960 at the same university, where he was later until his death as professor of surgery, specializing in the field of organ transplantation. During his career he published some 350 scientific papers.

His research focused on the study of the pathophysiological processes involved in the formation of a shock, the cryopreservation of biological tissue and the transfer of organs. He had been since 1959 one of the first doctors studying in animals the feasibility of transplantation of the intestine. On 17 December 1966 he conducted with his colleague William Kelly in combination with a kidney transplant, the first transmission of a pancreas from a deceased donor to a patient. A particular problem in the pancreas transplantation was his opinion thatit  was the only one of the major organs of the body whose removal from the donor's body is more difficult to perform than the operation of transmission to the receiver.

Lillehei died in 1981 at the age of 53 years due to a heart attack while jogging near his condominium on Sanibel Iceland in Florida. He was married and the father of four children. His brother Clarence Walton Lillehei, who was also a surgeon at the University of Minnesota, led in the first half of the 1950s, the first successful open heart surgery and is therefore considered one of the founders of cardiac and thoracic surgery . There exists since 1978 at the University of Minnesota a "C. Walton and Richard C. Lillehei Professorship in Cardiovascular Surgery", named after the two brothers.