Thomas E. Starzl

Thomas Earl Starzl (1926 to 2017) was an American surgeon and researcher often called the father of modern transplantation. Born in Le Mars, Iowa, he took his M.D. and a doctorate in neurophysiology at Northwestern University in 1952 and trained in surgery at Johns Hopkins and in Miami, where he developed an interest in liver biology. From 1962 he worked in organ transplantation at the University of Colorado, where he performed the first human liver transplant in 1963 and the first successful one in 1967. In 1981 he moved to the University of Pittsburgh. His listed achievements include establishing the clinical use of ciclosporin in 1982 and tacrolimus in 1991, advances in organ preservation and procurement, the first simultaneous heart and liver transplant in 1984, and the proposal of microchimerism in transplant tolerance. He wrote a memoir, The Puzzle People, in 1992, and his work was cited more than that of any other researcher in the world in a 1999 survey.