Serge Voronoff
Serge Voronoff (10 July 1866 to 3 September 1951) was a Russian-born French surgeon, naturalized French in 1895, who trained in Paris under Alexis Carrel. He performed his first chimpanzee-to-human testicular xenograft on 12 June 1920 and continued performing and licensing the procedure through the early 1930s. He maintained a private primate colony at Château Grimaldi near Menton on the French Riviera for the supply of chimpanzee tissue. By his own estimate the procedure had been performed “over 1,000” times worldwide by 1927; modern historical estimates put his personal total in the low hundreds and the worldwide total (including imitators) at 1,000 to 2,000 between 1920 and the late 1930s. He died in Lausanne, Switzerland, in September 1951 at age 85. His work was retired from mainstream surgical practice within his lifetime and has been treated as historical curiosity rather than active medical tradition since at least the 1940s.