A Conversation with Dr. Thomas Starzl: A Giant in Medicine

In a recent video, Dr. Thomas Starzl of the University of Pittsburgh Medical Center answers questions about his career as the “Father of Modern Transplantation.”

Throughout his career, Starzl invented techniques and models for managing heart blockages, performing transplants, and working with immunosuppressants. He performed the first successful liver transplant in 1967 and refined the use of immunosuppressive drugs. Due to his efforts over the last 50 years, thousands of patients with end-stage liver disease have been able to live long and active lives.

Starzl describes his career as beginning in 1945 after he was discharged from the navy. He used the G.I. Bill to go into medical school. He says that he pulled inspiration from his mother, who was a nurse and of whom he thought highly. In 1947, he received his BA and went off to medical school at Northwestern University. He explains why he dropped out of school for almost a year: to do “pure research” in neuroscience, in which he received his Ph.D. After joining John Hopkins, he delved into “another side alley of cardiac physiology.”

He says:

“After we had encountered complete heart block in some of the early heart operations, and needed to develop some way to deal with that complication, I developed a model of complete heart block in dogs, studied the complete physiology, figured out how to do pace making, and solved the problem.”

He then became interested in metabolism. He explains that he developed models of transplantation that involved either the liver alone or the liver with other abdominal viscera, and then became interested in transplantation biology. He says that the real opportunity in this field of clinical studies was to study rejection patterns in liver allographs for the first time. 

Starzl faced so much uncertainty about the nature of his research at the time that it was difficult to receive funding. He says that somehow he thought that everything would turn out all right, and that his greatest source of anxiety was actually the uncertainty of not knowing what to do.

He says,

“I referred to myself at one time as a missile searching for a trajectory. I was bursting with energy. I really wanted to do something that wasn’t conventional, that wasn’t bread and butter surgery as a means of making money; I wanted to do something important that would have a life of its own—that would endure. But what to do? I had come to be regarded as a dilatant, having gone through a Ph.D. in neuroscience and then a Ph.D. equivalent in working out the heart block problem, and now here I was wondering around, not pursuing either field. I just didn’t know what to do with myself.”

He went on to travel across the country and continue conducting clinical trials in order to work with liver transplants, realizing that a successful liver transplants and functions required healthy kidneys. He says he remembers his patients from clinical trials as if they were family members.

Watch the full interview below.