Starzl: accomplished surgeon and a best-selling author, too

The longest best-selling author from the University of Pittsburgh Press isn’t even a writer…. The longest best-selling author from the University of Pittsburgh Press isn’t even a writer. He’s a world-renowned transplant surgeon pioneer.

Situated between two stacks of his books, Dr. Thomas Starzl used his country charm to endear himself to his autograph seekers at a book-signing in the University Book Center last Thursday. Posing with fans for photographs and chatting with them about their lives, Starzl offered advice to those who came to thank him for his pioneering transplant work and to tell him their own organ transplant stories.

Now in its re-release as a paperback, “The Puzzle People: Memoirs of Transplant Surgeon,” recounts Starzl’s life and career, from his childhood memories to his worldwide recognition as a transplant surgeon. The book has an added epilogue and post-script that brings the book up to date with today’s medical procedures.

The addendums also describe the longevity milestones some of his first patients achieved, living 40 years as some of the first kidney-transplant recipients.

“Puzzle People” has sold close to 60,000 copies around the world and was translated into seven different languages. Starzl’s book has engaged physicians, transplant recipients and medical students across the globe.

All royalties from “Puzzle People” are donated to Transplant Recipients International Organization.

“You could say that this book has long-standing legs, considering how it’s been on the market and [is] still selling well,” Starzl said.

At one time, Starzl wrote an average of 7.3 papers a week. He has received more than 175 honors and awards, and he was placed at 213 in the book, “1,000 Years, 1,000 People: Ranking the Men and Women Who Shaped the Millennium,” according to his University of Pittsburgh Medical Center Web biography.

Fascinated by gyroscopes as a child in Iowa, Starzl rose to medical prominence after his release from the Navy in 1945. He went to Northwestern University Medical School in Chicago and, in 1952, he earned a Ph.D. in neurophysiology and an M.D. with distinction. He joined the faculty of the University of Colorado School of Medicine in 1962 and spent his last eight years there as chairman of the department of surgery.

Starzl left the University of Colorado for Presbyterian University Hospital, now part of UPMC, where he served as chief of transplant surgery services until 1991.

Starzl pioneered a common organ transplant treatment used today to prevent a host’s body from rejecting the newly planted foreign tissue. He combined Imuran and corticosteroids to suppress the body’s immune system. Starzl later worked on another breakthrough drug, this one a combination of anti-lymphocyte globulin and cyclosporine. This treatment enabled patients in the end stage of organ failure to receive an organ transplant. In 1989, Starzl and his team from UPMC discovered a new anti-rejection drug, FK506, which is also known as tacrolimus, or Prograf.

The Thomas E. Starzl Transplantation Institute is housed in UPMC Montefiore. On average, an organ is transplanted every 18 hours at any one of the three hospitals affiliated with the institute. Since 1981, nearly 12,000 transplants have been performed at Pitt — a single-center level of experience unmatched by any other program in the world, according to the Transplantation Institute Web site.