Thomas Starzl (March 11, 1926 – March 4, 2017) was an American doctor and scientist. He was known for his work in organ transplantation. He did the first liver transplantation in a person. Because of this, people sometimes call him the "father of modern transplantation."
In 2017, a movie about his work was released. It was called Burden of Genius. He also wrote a book about his life called The Puzzle People: Memoirs Of A Transplant Surgeon. The book was published in 1992.
Starzl was born on March 11, 1926, in Iowa, United States. His father, Roman Frederick Starzl, was a newspaper editor and writer. His mother, Anna Laura Fitzgerald, was a teacher and nurse. Starzl had three brothers and sisters.
As a teenager, he wanted to become a priest. But when his mother died from breast cancer in 1947, he decided to become a doctor instead.
Starzl studied at Westminster College in Missouri. He earned a Bachelor of Science degree in biology. Then he went to Northwestern University in Chicago to study medicine. He got a Master’s degree in anatomy in 1950. In 1952, he earned both a Ph.D. in neurophysiology and a medical degree (M.D.) with honors.
While he was at medical school, he became friends with Dr. Loyal Davis, a well-known neurosurgeon. Davis was the stepfather of Nancy Reagan, who later became First Lady of the United States.
Starzl stayed one more year in medical school to finish his Ph.D. He wrote an important paper on how the brain reacts to light and sound. That paper has been used by many other scientists.
In 1959, he received a Markle scholarship, a special award for young doctors.
After medical school, Starzl trained in surgery at Johns Hopkins Hospital in Baltimore and Jackson Memorial Hospital in Miami. He also worked in laboratories and studied how the liver works in animals. This research helped him later in his work with human organ transplants.
Thomas Starzl was a surgeon and a scientist. He worked on organ transplantation, which was a new field at that time. He worked at the University of Colorado Health Sciences Center from 1962 to 1981. Then he moved to the University of Pittsburgh School of Medicine.
In 1999, the Institute for Scientific Information said that Starzl’s work was the most cited in the world. From 1981 to 1998, other scientists cited his work 26,456 times.
Starzl did many important things in his career. In 1963, he performed the first liver transplant in a human. In 1967, he completed the first successful liver transplant. Both of these surgeries were done at the University of Colorado Health Sciences Center.
In the 1980s and 1990s, he showed that new medicines like cyclosporine and tacrolimus could help prevent the body from rejecting transplanted organs. These medicines were later approved by the FDA.
He helped improve the way organs are removed, stored, and moved before a transplant. He also helped doctors understand when organ transplants are useful and when they are not. Starzl showed that organ transplants can help treat some inherited diseases, like familial hypercholesterolemia, a condition that causes very high cholesterol. This idea helped other scientists think about future treatments like gene therapy.
Starzl also found that strong immunosuppressive drugs can cause serious infections or cancer after a transplant. He learned that lowering the dose of these drugs can help patients get better. In 1984, he performed the first heart and liver transplant at the same time. The patient was a six-year-old girl named Stormie Jones.
Later in his career, he suggested the idea of microchimerism. This means that a small number of the donor's cells stay in the recipient's body, which may help the body accept the new organ.
Thomas Starzl received many awards during his life for his work in medicine and science. In 2004, he was given the National Medal of Science by President George W. Bush. This is one of the highest honors a scientist can receive in the United States.
To honor his work, the University of Pittsburgh named one of its research buildings the Thomas E. Starzl Biomedical Science Tower in 2006.
In 2007, the city of Pittsburgh named a street near the medical campus Thomas E. Starzl Way.
In 2018, a statue of Starzl was placed on the university campus near the Cathedral of Learning.