Thomas Starzl

Thomas Earl Starzl (March 11, 1926 – March 4, 2017) was an American physician and researcher who specialized in organ transplantation. He is widely credited with performing the first human liver transplants and is often called "the father of modern transplantation." A 2017 documentary, *Burden of Genius*, examined the medical breakthroughs he led. Starzl also wrote an autobiography, *The Puzzle People: Memoirs Of A Transplant Surgeon*, which came out in 1992.

Starzl was born in Le Mars, Iowa, on March 11, 1926. His father, Roman Frederick Starzl, worked as a newspaper editor and science fiction writer; his mother, Anna Laura Fitzgerald, was a teacher and nurse. Of German and Irish descent, he was the second of four children. As a teenager, he planned to become a priest, but his mother’s death from breast cancer in 1947 changed his path. After graduating from Le Mars High School in 1944, he served briefly in the United States Navy Reserve.

He earned a Bachelor of Science in biology from Westminster College in Fulton, Missouri. At Northwestern University Medical School in Chicago, he received a Master of Science in anatomy in 1950, and in 1952 he earned both a Doctor of Philosophy in neurophysiology and an M.D. with distinction. While there, he became close friends with Professor Loyal Davis, a neurosurgeon whose wife’s daughter from a previous marriage was Nancy Reagan. Starzl took an extra year to complete his doctorate in neurophysiology, during which he wrote a highly cited paper on a technique for recording electrical responses in deep brain structures to sensory stimuli like light or sound; by January 2019, that paper had been referenced in 384 articles. He received a Markle scholarship in 1959. After medical school, he trained in surgery at Johns Hopkins Hospital in Baltimore and Jackson Memorial Hospital in Miami, where his lab and animal research focused on liver biology.

From 1962 until 1981, Starzl worked as a surgeon and researcher at the University of Colorado Health Sciences Center, then moved to the University of Pittsburgh School of Medicine. In 1999, the Institute for Scientific Information reported that his work had been cited more than any other researcher worldwide; between 1981 and June 1998, his publications received 26,456 citations. His autobiography, *The Puzzle People*, was written in three months and named by *The Wall Street Journal* as the third best book on doctors’ lives.

His major accomplishments include: performing the first human liver transplant in 1963 and the first successful one in 1967, both at the University of Colorado Health Sciences Center; establishing the clinical use of ciclosporin (cyclosporine) in 1982 and tacrolimus in 1991, both later approved by the Food and Drug Administration; developing technical advances in organ preservation, procurement, and transplantation; defining the indications and limits of abdominal organ transplantation; showing that organ transplantation could treat inherited metabolic diseases (providing a basis for gene therapy), notably in the case of Stormie Jones and familial hypercholesterolemia; recognizing that immunosuppression causes post-transplant lymphoproliferative disease and other opportunistic infections, and that reversing immunosuppression is a key treatment; performing the first simultaneous heart and liver transplant on six-year-old Stormie Jones at Children’s Hospital of Pittsburgh in 1984; and proposing microchimerism as a factor in organ transplant tolerance.

Starzl received numerous awards and honors. These include the Benjamin Franklin Medal for Distinguished Achievement in the Sciences (2016), the Anthony Cerami Award in Translational Medicine (2015), the Baruch S. Blumberg Prize (2014), the Lasker Award for clinical medical research (2012), the Carnegie Science Chairman’s Award (2010), the Gustav O. Lienhard Award (2009), the Physician of the Year Award for Lifetime Achievement (2009), the National Medal of Science (2004, presented by President George W. Bush in 2006), the John Scott Award (2004), the King Faisal International Prize for Medicine (2001), election to the American Philosophical Society (1999), the Lannelongue International Medal (1998), the Jacobson Innovation Award (1995), the Peter Medawar Prize (1992), the William Beaumont Prize in Gastroenterology (1991), the Distinguished Service Award from the American Liver Foundation (1991), the Golden Plate Award from the American Academy of Achievement (1983), the David M. Hume Memorial Award (1978), the Brookdale Award in Medicine (1974), the Bigelow Medal from the Boston Surgical Society, and the City of Medicine Award. He was also ranked No. 213 in the book *1,000 Years, 1,000 People: Ranking the Men and Women Who Shaped the Millennium*. He received honorary degrees from 26 universities—12 in Science, 11 in Medicine, 2 in Humane Letters, and 1 in Law. In 2006, on his 80th birthday, the University of Pittsburgh renamed one of its newest buildings in his honor.