An image of the commemorative poster, created by the historic Hatch Show Print letterpress shop in Nashville, honoring the Vanderbilt Transplant Center’s record-setting year. In 2025, Vanderbilt led the nation by completing 960 solid organ transplants.
Bill Frist, MD
This weekend, I opened a grand commemoration of the milestone Vanderbilt University becoming the most active organ transplant center in the United States. The commemorative, iconic Hatch Show Print poster unveiled Friday night aptly described the achievement:
VANDERBILT TRANSPLANT CENTER
#1 IN THE NATION
960 TRANSPLANTS IN 2025
“THE MOST IMPORTANT RECORD IN MUSIC CITY”
In my remarks, I shared the origin story.
The Foundation is Set: 1983–1993
Remarks by Bill Frist, MD, Founding Director
June 26, 2026
Vanderbilt Transplant Center Milestone of No. 1 in the Nation
The Thread That Connects Us
I want to begin with a man who walked the halls of our medical school at Vanderbilt four decades before I arrived at Stanford to train under him.
Surgical fellow Dr. Bill Frist (R) with pioneering heart transplant surgeon Dr. Norman Shumway (L) at Stanford in the early 1980s. Dr. Shumway’s methodic, evidence-based approach to transplantation provided a foundational model for the successful Vanderbilt Transplant Center started by Dr. Frist.
Bill Frist, MD
Norman Shumway entered Vanderbilt University School of Medicine in 1945 — immersed in the creative culture of Alfred Blalock and Barney Brooks, where experimental surgery was pursued with disciplined boldness. He left with his MD in 1949, later went to Stanford, and became what the world now calls the Father of Heart Transplantation. On January 6, 1968, he performed the first human heart transplant in the United States.
In 1983, I arrived at Stanford as his fellow. As my training drew to a close, Dr. Shumway, across the operating table one night, said words I have never forgotten:
“Dream big. Master the heart — no one yet has transplanted single lungs …. But the big vision is to create a unified multidisciplinary, multi-organ transplant center. That is what takes transplant to scale. “
He was sending me home — home to Nashville, home to the very medical school where he had been trained — to build something the world had never seen.
The Dream and the Blueprint
The vision was this: instead of isolated programs for kidneys, hearts, and later the still experimental lungs and livers— each siloed in its own department — bring them all under a single interdisciplinary roof with a single mission, religiously centered on the patient. Why? Because the knowledge that makes transplantation possible — immunology, rejection, immunosuppression, social work, rehabilitation, donor organ availability — is the same knowledge across all organs.
Let the specialists share it. Let infectious disease serve every program. Let one ethicist guide every team. Integrate, collaborate, unify. Truly, multidisciplinary.
While at Stanford, I put that vision into a 45-page planning document — part business plan, part clinical blueprint, part research agenda — and out of the blue sent it to Vice Chancellor Ike Robinson to see if Vanderbilt might have an interest. He read it, grasped it, committed the seed funding, and recruited me home to Nashville. The dream suddenly had an address.
The Foundation We Built On
When I joined the faculty in 1986, I found a stronger base than I could ever have hoped for. Dr. Keith Johnson and Dr. Bob Richie had built one of the great kidney transplant programs in the country — 1,600 transplants by 1988, the 14th largest program in the nation — and with it an institutional depth of knowledge about clinical immunosuppression that became the scientific foundation for everything else. The first kidney transplant at Vanderbilt was performed in 1962 by Dr. William Scott and Dr. Charles Zukoski.
Walter Merrill, with whom I had spent a couple of days at Stanford in 1984 as he prepared the heart transplant program, was already here, having performed Vanderbilt’s first adult heart transplant in 1985. Walter would become my indispensable, indefatigable partner in every endeavor that followed.
Dr. Walter Merrill (L) with the author, Dr. Bill Frist, in April 2025.
Bill Frist, MD
The Center Takes Shape
In January 1987, Walter and I performed Tennessee’s first heart-lung transplant — the first successful such operation in the Southeast. Two months later, Tennessee’s first pediatric heart transplant. In 1988, Dr. Hal Helderman and I were named Medical and Surgical Directors respectively of the new Vanderbilt Transplant Center.
On September 21, 1989, the center was formally chartered. The document declared: “The Vanderbilt Transplant Center is the first of its kind in the nation.” The stated mission:
“To propel and direct transplantation research, medicine, technology, education and public education of transplantation issues into the future as the recognized leader and national authority of multi-organ transplantation in the United States and abroad.”
Those words: “the recognized leader and national authority.” Remember this was written in 1989 before we had begun lung, before we had begun liver. Yes, it was aspirational at the time. Yet 37 years later that is the precise description of what stands in this room tonight.
The author and surgical team conducting a heart transplant in the first years of the Vanderbilt Transplant Center. Today, the Center is the busiest heart transplant center in the world.
John Howser, Vanderbilt University Medical Center
In our founding year we performed 28 heart transplants — 66 total since 1985 — 111 kidney transplants, and 75 bone marrow transplants under Dr. Steven Wolff. We hired the first full-time, center-based transplant ethicist in the country — Dr. Richard Zaner — and recruited Dr. Steve Dummer to build a dedicated transplant infectious disease program. Tracy Frazier served as our first administrative officer, making the grand vision operational day by day. Our first home was the entire ninth floor of the Oxford House. Janie Webb in social work. Jan Muirhead in nursing.
Drs. Bill Frist (L) and Jim Loyd (R) on a transplant run in the early 1990s.
John Howser, Vanderbilt University Medical Center
In December 1989, we launched the single-lung transplant program, collaborating closely with pulmonologist Dr. Jim Loyd, in a field still regarded experimental. One of our first lung patients — Pam Everett-Smith, transplanted in 1990 — last week was in town for her 36th annual wellness check, and is in the Guinness Book of World Records as the longest-surviving single-lung recipient in the world.
In 1990, we recruited Dr. Wright Pinson — a genius in the OR and out — who rapidly built our liver transplant program from scratch. With the liver program’s launch in 1991, every organ envisioned in the original blueprint was now operational: heart, lung, kidney, liver, pancreas, bone marrow — all under one roof, one mission, one culture.
The foundation was built … and it was strong: outcomes excellent, operationally multidisciplinary, published research bold and prolific, obsessively centered on the patient and families.
No other university medical center in America had built a foundational launching pad as for what was to come.
The Baton
In 1994, I left for the United States Senate. Wright Pinson took the directorship, and the founding chapter closed.
The author, Sen. Frist, with Dr. Wright Pinson at the Vanderbilt Transplant Center’s 1st in the nation celebration on June 26, 2026. Dr. Pinson took over leadership of VTC after Frist left for the Senate, and during his 18-year tenure at the helm, he helped build the program into one of the most prominent in the world, overseeing approximately 6,500 transplants of all types. In addition to being an accomplished surgeon, Dr. Pinson is also a talented musician.
Camryn Eaton
Norman Shumway trained at Vanderbilt. He told us to dream big and build what transplantation needed to go to scale. Together we built that foundation. What it has become — what we are celebrating tonight with the 960 patients transplanted last year and the tens of thousands of patients and families whose lives have been transformed over time — is the fullest answer we could give to the man who first imagined it.