By Morgan Fincham
AASLD is proud to recognize our 2009 Distinguished Achievement Award recipient, Nelson Fausto, MD. The AASLD Distinguished Achievement Award is given to an individual in honor of his or her sustained scientific contributions to the field of liver disease and the scientific foundations of hepatology. The award honors a sustained contribution rather than a single discovery or major achievement.
Professor Fausto is a graduate of the University of São Paulo School Of Medicine, and trained in pathology at the University of Wisconsin-Madison School of Medicine. He taught at Brown University, and is now the Chair of the Department of Pathology at the University of Washington, a position he has held for the last fifteen years.
At the beginning of his journey, he came to the United States to complete his education, not knowing he would concentrate in pathology. “Wisconsin was an absolutely fantastic place for liver research,” Prof. Fausto enthuses. Scientists at McArdle Laboratory were doing pioneering work in experimental pathology with the liver and in particular with liver regeneration.” He joined Brown University in 1967 and was the founding Chair of the Department of Pathology in 1983. “The medical school was just getting started,” Prof. Fausto explains, “The classes were small…Sixty students, very enthusiastic about pathology; for them, it was the first discipline that had any relationship with medical practice.” The Department of Pathology was located on campus and had a very close interaction with basic biologists. The contact with these colleagues had a major influence on the direction of his research.
Attending AASLD meetings and participating in countless talks, workshops, and sessions has made AASLD “very much a home." Prof. Fausto also developed a very close association with Hepatology, having served as an Associate Editor under Dr. Andres Blei and interacting with a wonderful group of Associate and Special Editors recruited by Dr. Blei.
Prof. Fausto is fascinated with regenerating liver. “Most amphibians can regenerate any part of the body,” he comments, but we cannot. The only organ that regenerates in humans is the liver.” This interesting problem, combined with the need to provide clinical solutions to patients, fuels his research. “After working with liver regeneration in rats and mice for many years,” Prof. Fausto explains, “we realized that the data was also applicable to liver growth in humans. Around this time liver transplantation became an accepted medical procedure, and a few years after, transplantation from living donors. Most of what we were doing in the lab could then be applied to clinical problems.”
Prof. Fausto is known for his research on liver regeneration, stem cells and hepatic cell lineages, pathogenesis of hepatocellular carcinoma, and the development of human and mouse hepatocyte culture systems. Prof. Fausto is co-editor of Robbins and Cotran’s Pathologic Basis of Disease and of Arias’ The Liver: Biology and Pathobiology. He was Editor-in-Chief of the American Journal of Pathology from 1992-2001. Prof. Fausto chaired the NIH Action Plan Group on Liver Development and Regeneration from 2004 to 2008.
Prof. Fausto currently leads a faculty of more than 100 members at the University Of Washington Medical Center, Harborview Hospital, the Seattle Cancer Care Alliance, and also faculty at Seattle Children’s and VA which are affiliated hospitals. He eloquently describes his current goals, “Pathology is at a cross roads; there are new methods of disease diagnosis and prognosis beyond morphology, that pathologists have to learn. We try to teach residents and fellows that there is much new knowledge to learn if pathology is to maintain its role in patient care, and scientific discovery.”
When not immersed in his many works at the University of Washington, Prof. Fausto collects “primitive” art from the Pacific Northwest, from his home country of Brazil, and Australian aborigines. He loves to photograph birds and exotic animals.