LAUSR

As underlined by Primo Levi who, like Vincenzo Mazzaferro, studied at the University of Turin, exceptional stories and achievements are a chain of exceptional events, many of which are not under our control. But the readers of the first and the friends of the second must add to this the ingredient of the exceptional attention and depth with which ordinary events and encounters are lived. Their decency – common to the writer and the surgeon and verging on shyness – does not allow them to mention it. Vincenzo Mazzaferro was born in Novara in 1957. Very gifted and hard-working from early on, he and his wife Giuse remember that their most formative time was in the Catholic voluntary groups of their native town, helping the poor, a trait that they have both exhibited throughout their lives. Admitted to the Medical Faculty of Turin, he topped up his scholarship with night work as theatre nurse at the Ospedale Mauriziano for Lorenzo Capussotti, a pioneer of liver surgery in Italy, where he was struck by the dismal outcomes of patients with hepatic tumours. He graduated with a thesis in 1982 on paediatric neuroblastoma, a comfortable pathway was offered to him in paediatric oncology, but he decided to follow the call to surgery, seen as a tool (indeed as one of the many necessary tools) to treat cancers. A recurring trait of Dr Mazzaferro’s early Italian career was his ability to overcome the constant current of nepotism and recommendations customary at the time. He had no Patron and was rejected in Turin; could enter the specialty in Milan, but no residency places were available for him as they were all assigned in advance. The examiner however offered him a position as a volunteer at the Istituto Nazionale Tumori, that the young Dr Mazzaferro had to fund himself with a scholarship. Underexposed to operative practice as virtually all his generation of Italian surgical trainees, he convinced his Director of the potential of liver transplantation to cure hepatic tumours at a time where this was considered a heresy. He single-handedly mounted an experimental programme at the faculty of veterinary medicine where he attracted his seniors and could learn liver transplantation on pigs. The logical consequence for the Unit was a clinical fellowship in Pittsburgh.