By Ron Seely
608-252-6131
November 17, 2007
For UW-Madison transplant researcher Will Burlingham, the distance between the laboratory and real life is not far. All he has to do is take a short stroll and he is among the hospital 's transplant patients, the very people he studies and has worked throughout his career to help.
That proximity makes a difference to Burlingham. Over the years, he has come to know many patients and to appreciate their struggles and their courage in the face of difficult surgeries and frequently long odds.
Burlingham 's specialty is trying to understand why transplant patients reject their new organs. In May 2000, he was just beginning what would become a successful but controversial seven-year study of lung transplants and a mysterious condition that causes many transplanted lungs to fail.
Through the investigation, Burlingham said, he was spurred less by the notion of success and publication than by the plight of two patients. The first two patients Burlingham worked with in 2000 at the outset of the study were dead within nine months, their new lungs having failed. In the intervening years, Burlingham and the other scientists discovered what may have destroyed their lungs and killed them and, consequently, they also discovered what could have saved them.
