Short answers, pulled from the story.
The first successful kidney transplant between living related donors took place in 1954. Richard Herrick received a kidney from his identical twin brother Ronald at Brigham & Women's Hospital in Boston under the care of Dr. Joseph Murray.
Cyclosporine was discovered in 1970 to allow surgeons to manage rejection effectively. This drug transformed transplantation from experimental research into a life-saving treatment by enabling long-term survival for recipients who previously would have died within weeks or months.
Christiaan Barnard performed the world's first human-to-human heart transplant on the 3rd of December 1967 in Cape Town, South Africa. His patient Louis Washkansky survived for eighteen days before dying of pneumonia despite the procedure sparking over one hundred transplants globally during 1968 and 1969.
Nearly 35,000 organ transplants occurred in the United States in 2017 alone while approximately 115,000 Americans remained on waiting lists at that time. Only 18 percent of these procedures came from living donors who gave a kidney or part of their liver.
In Pakistan forty percent to fifty percent of residents in some villages sold kidneys for about $2,500 with middlemen taking half the profit. In Chennai poor fishermen and families sold kidneys after the Indian Ocean tsunami destroyed their livelihoods on the 26th of December 2004 for amounts ranging from 40,000 to 60,000 rupees.
Spain maintains the highest worldwide donor rate with over 35 donors per million population annually. The United States created the Organ Procurement and Transplantation Network through the Organ Transplant Act of 1984 to allocate organs according to methodologies deemed most equitable by experts.