GRG Profiles: Professor Ignazio Marino

Ignazio Marino was born in Genoa, Italy, in 1955 as the son of a naval engineer. His interest in medicine, in particular surgery, began while attending high school as a mean to ‘‘achieve tangible results and life-changing out-comes on patients, by mastering what then appeared to [him] as an exact science and a clear scientific method.’’ At age 12, Ignazio heard about the first heart transplant operation, performed by Christiaan Barnard in Cape Town in 1967, which reinforced his interest.

Ignazio graduated summa cum laude in Medicine and Surgery from the Catholic University of Rome in 1979, writing his thesis on the first Italian trial of kidney autotransplantation. He then worked as an assistant professor at the department of Surgery of the Policlinico

Gemelli of Rome from 1980 to 1990. Although the field of organ transplantation was then developing quickly in Italy, it was clear that superior opportunities existed overseas. Dr. Marino spent 4 years training in the two most prestigious transplant centers in the world: the Transplantation Institute of the University of Cambridge (then the only liver transplant division in Europe), directed by Prof. Sir Roy Y. Calne, and the Pittsburgh Transplantation Institute, directed by Dr. Thomas E. Starzl, the pioneer who in 1963 performed the first human orthotropic liver transplantation.

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Springer Science+Business Media New York 2014