Pioneering surgeon Starzl, who first performed liver transplant, dies at 90
tion Institute, where he continued research on a process he called chimerism, based on a 1992 paper he wrote on the theory that new organs and old bodies “learn” to co-exist without immunosupression drugs.
The institute was renamed in Starzl’s honor in 1996, and he continued as its director.
Starzl’s career-long interest in research began with a liver operation he assisted on while a resident at Johns Hopkins Hospital in Baltimore. After the surgery to redirect blood flow around the liver, he noticed the patient’s sugar diabetes also had improved.
Thinking he had found the cause of diabetes to be in the liver rather than the pancreas, he designed experiments in 1956 with dogs to prove his discovery. He was wrong, but he had started on the path that would lead to the first human liver transplants at the University of Colorado in Denver seven years later.
Starzl’s other accomplishments included inventing a way to route the blood supply around the liver during surgery to make possible the marathon hours required to complete operations involving that complex organ.
He also showed that “soldier cells” from the transplanted organ become “missionary cells” that travel throughout the new body and find new homes, apparently helping the body accept the foreign organ.
Starzl helped develop with Dr. John Fung, his protege at UPMC and successor as director of transplant surgery, the use of the experimental anti-rejection drug FK506, which paved the way to more complicated transplants of multiple organs, including the difficult small intestine.
Starzl was born March 11, 1926, in LeMars, Iowa. His mother was a nurse and his father was a science fiction writer and the publisher of the local newspaper.