Parting Thoughts: Minnesota surgeon was the 'father of the pancreas transplants'

In our Parting Thoughts series, we remember everyday Minnesotans.

The list of accolades for Dr. David Elmer Richard Sutherland is vast. But his impact went well beyond professional accomplishments.

“He knew everybody by name. He knew about their families. He would inquire about them, and he always looked out for the patient,” said Dr. Raja Kandaswamy, Vice-Chair of the Transplantation Division at the University of Minnesota.

As a medical student in the 1960s, Sutherland discovered his interest in transplantation surgery. He trained at the University of Minnesota medical school, and did a stint in West Virginia, before heading off to the Army and into Vietnam.

From there, he returned to Minnesota where he worked with his mentor Dr. John Najarian and the two came up with the ground-breaking idea of treating diabetes via islet transplants: the process of taking healthy pancreas cells from a living but otherwise braindead patient and transplanting them into someone with Type I diabetes.

“We thought we could adapt that to humans; they were doing animal models,” Sutherland said in an interview with the American Society of Transplant Surgeons.

In 1974, they proved that hypothesis. Five years later, Sutherland conducted the world’s first living-donor partial pancreas transplant.

“He persisted until it became a standard for treatment of diabetes, and he's considered the ‘father of pancreas transplantation,’” Kandaswamy said.

Kandaswamy recalled the first time he met Sutherland in 1997. Kandaswamy came to the University of Minnesota as a transplant fellow, and when he walked into Sutherland’s office, the room was filled with stacks of papers.

“The desk, the chair, the table, everything,” Kandaswamy said, “With no rhyme or reason to them.”

But when Kandaswamy asked for a specific document, Sutherland reached over and plucked it out of a seemingly random pile with ease.

“That's emblematic of the man who kept things together when nobody else could,” Kandaswamy said.

But Sutherland’s work in the operating room was only a portion of his life. Outside the hospital and university, Sutherland loved horticulture despite “frustration of the tomato variants,” his obituary states. Kandaswamy also recalled his love for biking, which at times got in the way of work.

“He could be talking on the phone from his bicycle, and I’d have to tell him, ‘Dr. Sutherland, you need to stop somewhere and talk to me,’” he said.

Sutherland’s greatest legacy, though is perhaps the impact he made on those he trained and the patients he served around the world, Kandaswamy said. He received letters, emails and phone calls from doctors everywhere seeking his advice.

“And he would take the time to answer every single person,” Kandaswamy said.

Although Sutherland is no longer alive, his legacy and a piece of himself lives on.

“I operated on him in 2007, I think. It was in order to take out one of his kidneys to be donated to his wife,” Kandaswamy said. “I was fortunate to having known David, and consider him both a friend, philosopher and guide.”

Dr. David Sutherland died on March 23. He was 84. He is survived by Vanesa Sutherland, his wife of 28 years and is remembered locally and abroad.

To listen to the full Parting Thoughts interview, click the player above.

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