Francis T. Thomas, MD; Pioneer Transplant Surgeon, Alabama, 2011

BIRMINGHAM, AL — Dr. Francis T. Thomas, a pioneer organ transplant surgeon, retired former professor at UAB Department of Surgery, and lifelong medical scholar passed away from complications of myasthenia gravis and Addison’s disease on Nov. 25, 2011 in Birmingham, Alabama. His loving wife and scientific collaborator of 43 years, Dr. Judith Jannino Thomas, the daughter of the late Dr. and Mrs. Edmund Jannino, is formerly of Lynn, Massachusetts, also a retired UAB professor, was at his bedside. His three sons, Francis Scott Thomas from Charlotte NC, David Randolph Thomas from New York City, and Jason Hunter Thomas from Savannah, GA were also with him. Dr. Thomas was the son of the late Patricia Thornton and Gerald Thomas, former mayor of Hibbing, Minnesota. He was a graduate of Hibbing High School in 1957. After a three- year matriculation, he graduated from the University of Minnesota at Duluth and was admitted to the University of Minnesota School of Medicine in Minneapolis, where he received the M.D. degree in 1964. He was a Hunterian Scholar and spent several months studying Medicine and Surgery in London and Birmingham, UK, during his final year of medical school. His general surgery internship and residency training was completed at New York University Bellevue Hospital, and his cardiac surgery training was at Case Western Reserve University Hospital. He was board certified in both specialties. His first faculty position was with the team of the pioneer organ transplant surgeon Dr. David Hume at the Medical College of Virginia. Subsequently, Dr. Thomas went on to found the Organ Transplantation Program at East Carolina University School of Medicine in Greenville, NC, where he was professor and director of the program before relocating in 1995 to the University of Alabama at Birmingham, where he was actively engaged in transplantation and diabetes research.

Dr. Thomas’s election at a young age to membership in the most esteemed surgical societies underscores his many early academic contributions. Among the societies he belonged to are the American Surgical Society, American College of Surgeons (Fellow), Southern Surgical Society, Society of University Surgeons, American Society of Transplantation, American Society of Transplant Surgeons, and numerous others. He served tirelessly on scientific review boards for these societies as well as for the National Institutes of Health and the Juvenile Diabetes Association. He is the author of one book, numerous book chapters, and more than 350 medical journal publications.

He is remembered especially for scientific contributions that were successfully translated from the laboratory to the clinic, including the first demonstration that human hearts could withstand long distance transport for transplantation, the first controlled study showing that T cell depletion with high quality rabbit anithymocyte globulin provided exceptionally effective immunosuppression for transplant recipients, and the first use of intense immunological monitoring to guide the individualized dosing of immunosuppressive therapy to transplant patients. He conducted the first human kidney and pancreas transplants in eastern North Carolina, allowing rural patients access to transplant medicine without the often impossible burden of having to travel hundreds of miles from their families and homes. Beyond his scientific contributions, he should be remembered for saving the lives of many patients over the years, some of whom still enjoy life as a result of his work.