UNIVERSITY OF PITTSBURGHThomas Starzl, a surgeon who revolutionized the field of organ transplantation, died on Saturday (March 4) at his home in Pittsburgh at the age of 90. He performed the some of the very first liver transplants in the 1960s, including the first such surgery in which the patient lived more than one year after the operation. He also pioneered the use of various immunosuppressant drugs to help prevent organ rejection, now part of standard surgical procedure.
“We regard him as the father of transplantation,” Abhinav Humar, clinical director of the Thomas E. Starzl Transplantation Institute, told the Associated Press. “His legacy in transplantation is hard to put into words—it’s really immense.”
After earning an MD/PhD with a focus in neurophysiology from the Northwestern University Medical School in 1952, Starzl worked at Johns Hopkins Hospital in Baltimore, the University of Miami, and the Veterans Administration Research Hospital in Chicago, before joining the Northwestern faculty in 1958. In 1962, he moved to the University of Colorado School of Medicine, where he led the team of surgeons that performed the first successful liver transplant in a human patient in 1963. It would be another four years, however, until the team completed a transplant in ...
