A Northwestern graduate who performed the world’s first successful liver transplant will receive the nation’s highest scientific honor at a White House ceremony Monday.
Thomas Starzl will be awarded the National Medal of Science for his contributions to the field of transplant surgery.
“His pioneering work has been an inspiration to all of us in the field,” said Michael Abecassis of NU’s Feinberg School of Medicine. He has known Starzl since the mid-1980s.
Starzl received his master’s degree in anatomy from NU in 1950, followed two years later by both a doctorate in neurophysiology and a medical degree with distinction.
“I have a great debt to Northwestern and a great fondness,” Starzl said.
Starzl served on the NU faculty from 1958 to 1961. He started researching organ transplantation during that time.
Starzl was nominated for a scholarship designed to encourage medical school graduates to continue with research instead of becoming private physicians.
The scholarship was meant to identify young faculty members who were expected to propose challenging research projects, Starzl said.
“I was looking for a field that needed to be developed or didn’t exist,” he said. “And there was almost nothing about transplantation.”
The scholarship committee agreed with his proposal, and Starzl began working to develop a successful procedure for transplant surgery. He spent the first three years of the five-year scholarship working at NU.
The last two years of the scholarship were spent at the University of Colorado.
But “it all started at Northwestern,” Starzl said.
It was in 1967, during his tenure at the University of Colorado, that Starzl performed the first successful liver transplant. He then further developed the field of organ transplantation by discovering methods to decrease the risk that the body would reject donated organs.
The anti-rejection medications he introduced in 1980 became the standard for treating patients with liver, kidney and heart transplants.
Starzl joined the University of Pittsburgh School of Medicine in 1981, where he was made the chief of transplantation services and continued his research to develop improved anti-rejection medications.
A medication Starzl began using during surgery in 1989, called FK506, allowed doctors to extend the list of organs they were able to successfully transplant to include the pancreas, lung and intestine.
Starzl retired in 1991 but remains active in research at University of Pittsburgh’s Thomas E. Starzl Transplantation Institute.
He also published an autobiography about his experiences in the field of organ transplantation called “Puzzle People: Memoirs of a Transplant Surgeon.”
Reach Joanna Allerhand at [email protected].
