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The long reach of liver transplantation

Nature Medicine volume 18, pages 1489–1492 (2012)Cite this article

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After graduating from high school in my hometown of Le Mars, Iowa, I had a stint in the US Navy (1944–1945), earned a BA degree from Westminster College in Missouri (1947) and completed two years of medical school at Northwestern University (1947–1949). I then dropped out to do research in neurophysiology under the inspiring tutelage of Horace W. Magoun, first at Northwestern and subsequently at the then-new medical school of the University of California, Los Angeles. With MD and PhD degrees from Northwestern, I served a one-year internship at Johns Hopkins Hospital before doing a full-time, 18-month study of complete heart block, which was a frequent complication with the first human open-heart operations. The experiments involved creation of a canine model of heart block and treatment of its adverse consequences with repetitive low-voltage ventricular stimulation—the first epicardial pacemaking.

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Figure 1: Three early approaches to liver transplantation.
Figure 2: Early successes of liver transplantation.
Figure 3: Stepwise immunosuppression-associated improvements in liver-transplant survival.
Figure 4
Figure 5: The kinetics of immunosuppression-aided exhaustion and deletion of host-versus-graft (HvG) and graft-versus-host (GvH) responses occurring contemporaneously in organ recipients after migration of the graft's passenger leukocytes.

References

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  1. Thomas E. Starzl is Director Emeritus, Thomas E. Starzl Transplantation Institute, Professor of Surgery, Distinguished Service Professor, University of Pittsburgh, Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, USA.,

    Thomas E Starzl

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Correspondence to Thomas E Starzl.

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Starzl, T. The long reach of liver transplantation. Nat Med 18, 1489–1492 (2012). https://doi.org/10.1038/nm.2927

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