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GENE J. PUSKAR/APDr. Thomas E. Starzl is seen here in 1989 as he oversees a liver
transplant operation at the University of Pittsburgh Medical Center in
Pittsburgh.
By ASSOCIATED PRESS
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PITTSBURGH — Dr. Thomas
Starzl, who pioneered liver transplant surgery in the 1960s and was a leading
researcher into anti-rejection drugs, has died. He was 90.
The
University of Pittsburgh, speaking on behalf of Starzl’s family, said the
renowned doctor died Saturday at his home in Pittsburgh.
Starzl
performed the world’s first liver transplant in 1963 and the world’s first
successful liver transplant in 1967, and pioneered kidney transplantation from
cadavers. He later perfected the process by using identical twins and,
eventually, other blood relatives as donors.
Since
Starzl’s first successful liver transplant, thousands of lives have been saved
by similar operations.
“We
regard him as the father of transplantation,” said Dr. Abhinav Humar, clinical
director of the Thomas E. Starzl Transplantation Institute. “His legacy in
transplantation is hard to put into words — it’s really immense.”
Starzl
joined the University of Pittsburgh School of Medicine in 1981 as professor of
surgery, where his studies on the anti-rejection drug cyclosporin transformed
transplantation from an experimental procedure into one that gave patients a
hope they could survive an otherwise fatal organ failure.
It was
Starzl’s development of cyclosporin in combination with steroids that offered a
solution to organ rejection.
Until
1991, Starzl served as chief of transplant services at UPMC, then was named
director of the University of Pittsburgh Transplantation 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.
In his
1992 autobiography, “The Puzzle People: Memoirs of a Transplant Surgeon,”
Starzl said he actually hated performing surgery and was sickened with fear
each time he prepared for an operation.
“I was
striving for liberation my whole life,” he said in an interview.
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 had started on the path that would lead to the first human liver
transplants at the University of Colorado in Denver seven years later.
In the
early 1990s, livers from baboons were transplanted into humans, an operation
made possible by Starzl’s research into alternatives to scarce human livers.
While work continues on such animal-to-human transplants, most researchers now
focus on pigs rather than primates and use genetic engineering to try to knock
out some proteins most involved in causing acute rejection, Humar said.
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. FK506 was discovered in a soil sample
by Japanese researchers.
In
September 1990, at age 65, Starzl put away his scalpel for good, soon after the
death of a famous young patient: a 14-year-old girl from White Settlement,
Texas, named Stormie Jones. Starzl also underwent a heart bypass operation in
1990 and suffered lingering vision problems from a laser accident five years
earlier.
Stormie
lived six years after a combination heart-liver transplant at age 8 but needed
a second liver in 1990 and died within nine months. Her death affected Starzl
greatly.
“It is
true that transplant surgeons saved patients, but the patients rescued us in
turn and gave meaning to what we did, or tried to,” he once wrote.
Allegheny
County Executive Rich Fitzgerald called Starzl “a true Pittsburgh icon and
hero,” whose research had worldwide impact and had proven an economic boon to
the region as well.
“The
number of lives which were, and continue to be transformed, by Dr. Starzl’s
groundbreaking work are immeasurable,” he said.
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. Starzl’s
uncle, the late Frank Starzel, was general manager of the Associated Press from
1948 to 1962.
Starzl is
survived by his wife of 36 years, Joy Starzl, his son, Timothy, and a
grandchild.
