On August 31, 1989, a few months before the first such operation, Broelsch and colleagues published a paper in the New England Journal of Medicine to explain their medical and ethical reasoning as they began to select potential patients and donors. “We propose to transplant a liver lobe from a living donor—the parent of the recipient—to a non-critically ill infant with advanced liver disease,” they wrote.
Over the next five years, the University of Chicago and Broelsch’s team became the leaders in adult to pediatric living donor liver transplantation, performing 78 of these operations, representing close to half of all those performed throughout the United States. Their success stimulated many surgeons throughout the world to develop similar programs while others worked to solve the technical problems that soon led to the application of living donor and split liver transplantation into adult recipients.