Two years after the death of Thomas Starzl, the pioneering organ transplant surgeon, Pittsburghers have a chance to see a new documentary film that pulls together many pieces of Dr. Starzl’s complex life.

The film, “Burden of Genius,” will be shown April 12-18 at the Rangos Giant Cinema at Carnegie Science Center. Special presentations are planned after several of the showings.

Dr. Starzl performed the world’s first liver transplant in Denver in 1963 and Pittsburgh’s first liver transplant in 1981 after moving here at the end of 1980. He was surgeon for the first heart-liver transplant in 1984, in young Stormie Jones, who survived until 1990, reaching the age of 13. He led the transplant of five organs for Tabatha Foster, who survived for six months.

The film begins with a young man driven to specialize in the high-risk field of organ transplants particularly because it seemed hopeless.

“I believe I understood it was very dangerous. If you cannot make it work, you’re ruined,” Dr. Starzl says in the film.

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Watch the trailer for “Burden of Genius”:

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The 90-minute film features interviews with Dr. Starzl starting in 2014 and includes the celebration of his 90th birthday in Pittsburgh, almost a year before his death in 2017. There are interviews with surgeons who trained under him at the University of Pittsburgh, as well as other transplant professionals, patients and family members.

Sharing her memories of training under Dr. Starzl is Velma Scantlebury, associate chief of transplant surgery in the kidney transplant program in the Christiana Care Health System in Delaware. In 1986, Dr. Scantlebury began her fellowship at the Pitt School of Medicine. Between 1988 and 2002 she worked as a transplant surgeon at Pitt, and in 1989 she became the first African-American woman transplant surgeon.

“It was a remarkable experience for me to be able to work with him, being there to watch him operate, watching him as his mind was constantly turning with new ideas,” Dr. Scantlebury recalled last week. “He was always in the mode of what we can do next, what we can do differently.”

The University of Pittsburgh production was directed by Tjardus Greidanus and produced by Laura Davis and Carl Kurlander. Ms. Davis and Mr. Kurlander, both native Pittsburghers with physicians in their families, were drawn to the surgeon’s story.

“In medicine it always takes risks to get to the next level,” Mr. Kurlander said in a recent interview.

The Pittsburgh screenings are the film’s first public run, although it’s been shown at film festivals, winning best documentary prizes at the Cleveland International Film Festival and the Raw Science Film Festival in Los Angeles.

“Dr. Starzl was one of the most fantastic minds of the 20th century,” Mr. Greidanus said. “Everybody does not know him. He’s a titanic thinker.”

In Pittsburgh Dr. Starzl built his reputation with high-profile surgeries and transformed the University of Pittsburgh Medical Center into the busiest transplant center in the world. 

To the film’s credit, ethical issues over which patients were treated first are part of the story. Recalling the early days of choosing patients is Sandee Staschak-Chicko, now director of development at the Starzl institute. Dr. Starzl in the film is still obviously angry about Pittsburgh Press reporting in the mid-’80s that found some foreign citizens were getting transplants ahead of American patients in apparent violation of policy at Presbyterian-University Hospital at the time.

The issue was raised by Donald Denny, former organ procurement director, and his remarks are included in the film, along with those of medical ethicist Renee Fox. Dr. Starzl did respond to the crisis with a more transparent policy.

“They both believed they were doing the right thing,” Mr. Greidanus. “They were both very strong ethical people. You could see the clash between them. … We didn’t want to do a puff piece about Dr. Starzl.”

The filmmakers hope to have the movie become part of the educational curriculum, showing how real science progresses, according to Mr. Kurlander.

The film has instructional animation and real-life scenes of surgery, along with archival images, commentary from writers who have covered Dr. Starzl’s career, and most interesting of all, stories told by the doctors who stood elbow-to-elbow with Dr. Starzl around the operating table, extending their hands deep into a patient’s body, cutting and suturing under the brightest lights, tuning into Dr. Starzl’s every direction.

The push to give very sick children a chance at life with a new liver put the first surgeons in a precarious place, having to learn as they went the best technique, including ways to reduce the excessive and distressing loss of blood during surgery.

"It tests all of your skills," said Ngoc Thai, head of surgery at Allegheny Health Network and director of its Center for Abdominal Transplantation, as he recalls the history of liver transplants in the film. After his training with Dr. Starzl, Dr. Thai served in top positions at the Thomas E. Starzl Transplantation Institute of UPMC before going to AHN.

Another colleague in the film explains the first obstacle was inventing a surgical procedure to protect the blood vessels of the liver.

John Fung, now director of the University of Chicago Transplantation Institute, recalls one patient lost 300 units of blood during an operation. The medical team wore boots and found themselves standing several inches deep in blood.

As he trained surgeons, Dr. Starzl’s research focused on better anti-rejection drugs for organ recipients, finding in 1989 that the new drug FK506 (tacrolimus) was an effective alternative to cyclosporine, discovered in the 1970s. Since then, both have become the principal immunosuppressant drugs for solid organ transplantation. Dr. Starzl and his colleagues developed a new protocol to try to find the minimum dose necessary for patients.

What started out as a controversial, high-risk experiment became a widely accepted therapy for end-stage liver disease.

The filmmakers tapped a gold mine of interviews when colleagues arrived in Pittsburgh for a celebration of Dr. Starzl’s 90th birthday at Station Square. That marathon of first-person narratives is probably the most durable contribution to the documentary that aims to bring medical history to the general public.

But the film goes beyond a dry laudatory description of Dr. Starzl’s medical marvels.

"I wanted to bring to the surface his humanity," Mr. Greidanus said. "There was an interesting dichotomy of how relentless he was … and his humanity; his feelings for his patients. I kept trying to bring that to the forefront."

The surgeon’s second wife, Joy, glows with her stories about meeting and building a home with him. Author David McCullough places Dr. Starzl in the legion of history-makers. Patients — among them musician David Crosby — express pure gratitude. His son Tim describes Dr. Starzl as a missing person in his childhood; he later worked in the lab with his famous father. 

Today, Dr. Scantlebury said, the transplantation field is more collaborative, and one single surgeon doesn’t bring about change.

“Dr. Starzl had so much opposition then,” she said. “Others working on it had given up. He was one of the few who were persistent.”

For information about “Burden of Genius” at the Carnegie Science Center: http://www.carnegiesciencecenter.org/rangos-giant-cinema/burden-of-genius/

Jill Daly: 412-263-1596

First Published: April 8, 2019, 12:00 p.m.
Updated: April 8, 2019, 12:47 p.m.