Peter Morris qualified in Medicine at Melbourne University in 1957 and held surgical and academic posts there, in the UK and in the USA. His professional scientific career revolved around transplantation and transplantation biology, with a major interest in the immune response to histocompatibility antigens and its suppression. In addition to his work in transplantation, in the earlier part of his career he made many contributions to the knowledge of the association between HLA and disease, as well as playing a major part in the early anthropological studies of HLA around the ‘Pacific Rim’ area. His interest in clinical transplantation began at the Royal Post-Graduate Medical School, Hammersmith, where in 1962 Professors Ralph Shackman and James Dempster performed the first living unrelated renal transplant. It continued at Massachusetts General Hospital, Boston USA, where after a year as a senior surgical resident he became a research Fellow with Jack Burke, studying the immunology of surgical infection. His embryonic interest in the histocompatibility system in man was aroused by Dr Paul Russell, who was developing a living related transplant programme. It was further stimulated at Duke University by Dr Bernard Amos and at the University of California, Los Angeles (UCLA), where he was enormously impressed by Paul Terasaki’s work on microcytotoxicity techniques. In 1966 he was invited by Dr David Hume, an eminent pioneer of transplantation, to develop a tissue typing laboratory for the Medical College of Virginia (MCV). This he achieved quite quickly. In the same year he joined Professor Maurice Ewing at the Royal Melbourne Hospital and the University of Melbourne, where he continued to work in general and transplantation surgery as well as in transplant immunology. Along with his PhD student John Fabre (also a future BTS President) he developed a rat model of allograft tolerance, which was to remain a long-term research project.

In 1973 he was appointed Nuffield Professor of Surgery at Oxford University, where he founded, and was Director of, the Oxford Transplant Centre, which achieved outstanding results in renal transplantation. He established a major vascular unit and also developed an internationally renowned research programme in transplant immunology, including histocompatibility testing. He was elected as Chairman of the British Transplantation Society in 1978. Later he was a co-founder, with John Bell, of the Wellcome Trust Centre for Human Genetics. From 1984 to 1986 he was President of the Transplantation Society, from which, in 2006, he received the Medawar Prize (along with Carl Groth and Pekka Hayry). From 1976 he was an associate editor of its journal, Transplantation, and later, in the 1980s, he succeeded Richard Batchelor as its senior editor in Europe.

In 1994, he was elected a Fellow of the Royal Society, and, in 1998 became a Foundation Fellow of the Academy of Medical Sciences. From 2001 to 2004 he was President of the Royal College of Surgeons of England. In 2005 he established, and became Director of, The Centre for Evidence in Transplantation (CET). The CET evaluates the quality of evidence in the field of organ transplantation and has been responsible for the development of an electronic library of all randomised controlled trials in organ transplantation. In the United States he was elected Foreign Member of both the National Academy of Medicine and the American Philosophical Society. He has been awarded numerous honorary fellowships, honorary degrees and awards (including, in 1998, the Lister Medal of the Royal College of Surgeons and, in 2006, the Medawar Prize of the Transplantation Society). He has been a visiting professor in some fifty institutions. In 2012 he delivered the Halford Oration at the 150th anniversary of the Melbourne University Medical School. He has published over 700 scientific articles and is among the 200 most cited authors in clinical medicine worldwide. His book, Kidney Transplantation: Principles and Practice, which is a leading work in the field, was first published in 1979 and is now in its eighth edition. In addition, he edited the Oxford Textbook of Surgery (1994). In 1996 he was knighted for services to medicine, and in 2004 he was made a Companion of the Order of Australia for services to medical sciences. He was made an Honorary Member of the BTS in 1997.

As a medical student Peter Morris played professional cricket and baseball in Melbourne. Later, at Oxford, he took part in tennis tournaments with Roy Calne and other colleagues in Oxford and Cambridge, and also enjoyed golf trips with Ross Taylor, Douglas Briggs, and Bob Johnson (all Past Presidents of the BTS). On January 6 2002 he was the ‘castaway guest’ of Sue Lawley on Desert Island Discs.