FILE - This Nov. 10, 1989 file photo shows transplant pioneer Dr. Thomas E. Starzl as he oversees a liver transplant operation at the University of Pittsburgh Medical Center in Pittsburgh. A release at the request of the Starzl family by the University of Pittburgh Medical Center says Dr. Starzl died at the age of 90, Sat., March 4, 2017 at his home in Pittsburgh. He was 90. (AP Photo/Gene J. Puskar, File)
On Feb. 14, 1984, Dr. Thomas Starzl performed the world’s first heart-liver transplant at University of Pittsburgh Medical Center.
Forty-two years ago today, Dr. Thomas Starzl performed the world’s first heart-liver transplant at University of Pittsburgh Medical Center.
Starzl arrived at UPMC from Colorado in 1981, having already performed the world’s first successful liver transplant surgery, and invented or advanced other experimental organ transplant operations.
On Feb. 14, 1984, Starzl performed the heart-liver transplant on a 6-year-old girl from Texas named Stormie Jones, who suffered from a rare condition in which the body’s LDL cholesterol was elevated to near-lethal levels. For the procedure, Starzl used the heart and liver of a 4-year-old girl who had died in a car accident. Jones lived for seven years after the transplant, until her body unexpectedly rejected the heart.
More than 200 such operations have been performed since Starzl’s landmark surgery in 1984. It’s believed that his research has been cited in medical journals more than any other researcher in the world, and his pioneering efforts are widely considered to have made organ transplant procedures broadly applicable in humans.
Starzl died in 2017, but his legacy lives on in Pittsburgh through the Thomas E. Starzl Transplantation Institute and the Thomas E. Starzl Biomedical Science Tower. You can learn much more about Starzl through the University of Pittsburgh’s official Thomas E. Starzl website.
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