George Thorn was professor of medicine at the Peter Bent Brigham Hospital in Boston. In 1947-1950 with Carl W. Walter and later on Benjamin Miller and John Merrill, Thorn helped devlop dialysis to the stage where it became standard therapy in the United States.
In 1951 David Hume, Thorn and Gustav Dammin grafted kidneys from one subsubject to another using the thigh as the recipient site. There was a previous emergency attempt to graft a kidney onto an arm.