If there’s one organ we take for granted (or try to forget) during any festivities, it’s the liver. With every sip of left-over New Year mulled wine (or something stronger), we turn a blind eye to that engine room of the digestive system: the complex mass of ligaments and lobes that does 500 jobs, including the detoxification of harmful substances.
I’ve been wondering a lot about that mighty organ. Not that there is anything wrong with me just yet, but backed up previous findings that suggested practically any amount of alcohol consumption can be detrimental to one’s health – and the pitfalls include liver cancer, cirrhosis and other liver diseases.
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Up to 800 liver transplants in the UK alone. But those surgeries might never have happened were it not for the brilliance and persistence of a pioneering surgeon, Thomas Starzl, who died in 2017, a week before his 91st birthday. Watching a new documentary, , about his life and career at the recentĚý in London, it was clear that this was an extraordinary tale.
Rocky road to liver transplant
Starzl started out by experimenting on dogs and gradually developed, single-handedly, a technique for transplanting livers that successfully grappled with the many tubes and arteries that must be stitched into place. In 1963, he performed the world’s first human liver transplant, but the patient bled to death during surgery.
Undeterred, the surgeon carried on trying to improve the operation and worked on ways to suppress the immune system so transplant patients could accept donor organs. After four years, in 1967, he finally carried out the first successful liver transplant.
Burden of Genius makes much of the criticism Starzl faced for Ěýattempting these operations. He was accused of playing God by putting families through unnecessary trauma. He called the criticisms “bullets” and decided to ignore them, carving out a reputation as an uncompromising perfectionist, with his team at the University of Pittsburgh Medical Center arguably becoming the best in the world.
Starzl Ěýremained directly involved in surgery until he retired from the operating theatre in 1991, even flying to hospitals where donors had died so that he could perform surgery to retrieve the healthy liver and then fly back to Pittsburgh (with the liver) to carry out the transplant. As the film explains, one of those flights had a high-speed crash landing – but Starzl still carried out the transplant.
The cost of success
Like all good titles, the “burden” in the title can refer to many things: to the burden faced by Starzl, to his over-worked staff, and to those close to him. We discover that his first wife left him, and that he spent little time with his children, two of whom died before he did. His remaining son refers to him as “Dr Starzl” in the film.
Was all that sacrifice worth it? Sadly, yes. It was only a few decades ago, during the 1980s and 1990s, that liver transplants became common worldwide. They now account for some 23,000 out of the 135,000 total organ transplants that .
And while they are more common, many patients wait for more than a year because of the lack of . Some die before an organ is ready. In 2018, the British parliament requiring patients and families to “opt-out” of organ donation in England. But formal consent will still be sought by doctors and .
Burden of Genius leaves us with plenty to think about – not least of which, with the festivities (or at least the 12 days) drawing to a close, is the certainty that it’s worth skipping that extra glass for the sake of your future liver. Cards on the table, I could have taken better care of mine in 2018 – who among us would say otherwise? But raise your orange juice. Here’s to 2019 and the memory of Dr Starzl.
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Burden of Genius, directed byĚýTjardus Greidanus, is not yet on general release
