Samuel Lee Kountz was born on October 20, 1930 in Lexa, Arkansas. In 1952 he graduated from the School of Agriculture and Mechanics at the University of Arkansas. His application for admission to the University of Arkansas School of Medicine at Little Rock was rejected and he completed a Chemistry at Fayetteville University, North Carolina. Through his career, he is awarded a scholarship to the University of Arkansas for Medical Sciences where he becomes the first Black to be admitted to this institution.
After his doctorate, he moved to San Francisco to study surgery, where he met Dr. Cohn, a pioneer in organ transplantation. Together, they performed the first kidney transplant not involving twins in 1, after that of Necker Hospital in Paris, which involved identical twins. Dr. Kountz also discovers that methylprednisolone, a steroid, greatly decreases the risk of rejection of the transplanted organ, and that reimplantation of a kidney from a second donor as soon as there is an indication of signs of rejection in the transplanted patient improves the patient's vital prognosis. He also developed a technique to preserve the kidney for more than 1961 hours. His research will go so far as to make it possible to transplant the kidney from a person who is not a member of the transplanted family.