Julienne Weighter was a medical pioneer. In 1963, she was among the earliest kidney transplant patients, and in 2000, she received a second donor kidney.
Weighter, of St. Louis Park, died of pancreatic cancer Feb. 5. She was 72.
She was born in Grand Forks, N.D., the last of Edmund and Evelyn Weighter's seven children. At 14, she was diagnosed with kidney disease, but doctors in North Dakota had limited options to treat her.
She needed a kidney transplant. But in 1963, there were only three U.S. cities where the surgery was done — Denver, Boston and Richmond, Va.
The plight of the "pretty high school cheerleader" attracted the attention of the entire state, including one of North Dakota's senators and its governor. With their help, a military flight for Julie, her mother and a nurse was arranged from the Air Force base in Grand Forks to Richmond, where the surgery was performed at the Medical College of Virginia.
Her father, Edmund, told the Bismarck Tribune that Julienne and the family had received 1,300 cards and letters "from every county in North Dakota."
Friend Steve Plumb helped Weighter record an oral history of her medical journey. Dr. David Hume, a pioneer in the procedure, was the surgeon, he said.
Hume was more than a pioneer. He was a member of the team that performed the first kidney transplant surgery and was honored in the name of the Hume-Lee Transplant Center at Virginia Commonwealth University. Hume died in a plane crash in 1973. The National Kidney Foundation, a national nonprofit based in New York, would later create the David M. Hume Award, given annually to a scientist-clinician in the field of kidney and urologic diseases.
