Well, it’s a pleasure and an honor also to introduce this CD ROM, which has been prepared by someone whom I consider to be a genuine pioneer in liver transplantation. 
Doctor Gridelli as a young man came to Pittsburgh in the early 1980’s, at a time when liver transplantation was just about to go over the top as a clinical service, and so he was in the trenches with me and with others during that critical time nearly twenty years ago. I think it was a very fortunate recruitment when Doctor Gridelli moved to Bergamo in 1997 an set up a program that was focused exclusively on pediatric liver transplantation or pediatric transplantation.
Well in the history of transplantation there is a repeat of the biblical saying that “the children shall lead you”; liver transplantation really developed because of the incentive offered by those miserable children with biliary atresia who died agonizing deaths. All of the longest survivors in the world in these patients, who are now thirty years or more post-transplantation, were children at the time of their operation. So we learned how to manage this cases, these difficult cases, learned how to do the operation with children and applied the lessons to adults. The story of course is being repeated here. 
Because of the organ shortage now it has been necessary to increase the supply of organs and one way of doing this – perhaps the best way – has been to do the liver split procedures that have been used very much in the Bergamo program in collaboration with some of the other programs in Italy. And now that technology, which had first resulted in one large and one small fragment, has been altered so that two medium size fragments can be used to treat two adults. That’s a very important story because essentially what it does is to double the organ supply for adults, and it accommodates the needs also of the children. 
This is a very good group that has produced this CD-ROM and I hope that you will take from it some of the meaningful lessons that have been learned from hard experience by Gridelli and his associates. Thank you very much

Thomas E. Starzl, MN. D., Ph. D
Professor of Surgery