John Najarian, a celebrated transplant surgeon whose skill on the operating table and with an anti-rejection drug that landed him on trial in federal court, expanded the lifesaving potential of organ transplants beyond what was once thought to be possible, died Aug. 31 at a nursing home in Stillwater, Minn. He was 92.
He had heart ailments, said his son David Najarian.
Historians of medicine place Najarian in the pantheon of surgeons who developed organ transplantation overcoming the skepticism of critics who regarded the procedure as an impossibility, something drawn from science fiction.
Najarian spent most of his career at the University of Minnesota's medical school.In the operating room, he performed devilishly complex surgeries. In 1970, Najarian stitched a new kidney into a 6-week-old baby, using magnification to view the child's minuscule veins. At a time when few other surgeons would perform transplants on children so young, Najarian would review their cases and declare: "I can do it."
Perhaps his most famous patient was 11-month-old Jamie Fiske, who was born with biliary atresia, a rare condition of the liver and bile ducts. In 1982, Najarian transplanted the liver of a boy killed in a car accident.