Thomas Starzl

Life

Early years

Starzl was born on March 11, 1926, in Le Mars, Iowa, the son of newspaper editor and science fiction writer Roman Frederick Starzl and Anna Laura Fitzgerald who was a teacher and a nurse. Of German and Irish descent, he was the second of four siblings. Originally intending to become a priest in his teenage years, Starzl changed his plans drastically when his mother died from breast cancer in 1947. He briefly served in the United States Navy Reserve after graduating from Le Mars High School in 1944.

Education

He attended Westminster College in Fulton, Missouri, where he earned a Bachelor of Science degree in biology. Starzl attended Northwestern University Medical School in Chicago, where in 1950 he received a Master of Science degree in anatomy and in 1952 earned both a Doctor of Philosophy in neurophysiology and an M.D. with distinction. While attending medical school, he established a long friendship with Professor Loyal Davis, MD, a neurosurgeon (whose wife Edith Luckett Davis' daughter from her first marriage was Nancy Reagan).

Starzl spent an extra year at medical school, using the additional time to complete a doctorate in neurophysiology, in 1952. He wrote a seminal paper describing a technique to record the electrical responses of deep brain structures to sensory stimuli such as a flash of light or a loud sound. The paper is highly cited, having been referenced in 384 articles by January 2019.

In 1959, he gained a Markle scholarship.

After obtaining his medical degree, Starzl trained in surgery at Johns Hopkins Hospital in Baltimore and Jackson Memorial Hospital in Miami. At both places, he conducted lab and animal research, showing a keen interest in liver biology.

Career

Starzl was a surgeon and researcher in the then nascent field of organ transplantation at University of Colorado Health Sciences Center from 1962 until his move to University of Pittsburgh School of Medicine in 1981.

The Institute for Scientific Information released information in 1999 that documented that his work had been cited more than any other researcher in the world. Between 1981 and June 1998, he was cited 26,456 times.

His autobiographical memoir, The Puzzle People, was named by The Wall Street Journal as the third best book on doctors' lives and was written in three months.

Starzl's most notable accomplishments include:

• Performing the first human liver transplant in 1963, and the first successful human liver transplant in 1967, both at the University of Colorado Health Sciences Center.
• Establishing the clinical utility of ciclosporin (cyclosporine) in 1982, and tacrolimus in 1991, both leading to Food and Drug Administration approval;
• Development of multiple technical advances in organ preservation, organ procurement and organ transplant;
• Delineating the indications and limitations of abdominal organ transplantation;
• Defining the underlying basis for organ transplantation as a treatment of inherited metabolic diseases (thus providing the rationale for current-day gene therapy efforts), specifically for familial hypercholesterolemia, as in the case of Stormie Jones;
• Recognizing the causative role of immunosuppression in the development of post-transplant lymphoproliferative disease and other opportunistic infections and the utility of reversing the immunosuppressed state as the principal treatment;
• Performing the first simultaneous heart and liver transplant on six-year-old Stormie Jones at Children's Hospital of Pittsburgh in 1984;
• Proposing microchimerism in organ transplant tolerance.