Photo: Private Archives
The renowned Croatian scientist and medical doctor is one of the greatest authorities on hematopoietic stem cell transplantation in the world
Steven Živko Pavletić is a renowned Croatian internist, haematologist and oncologist, and an internationally recognised authority on hematopoietic stem cell transplantation.
He is the head of the autoimmunity and bone marrow transplant complications unit at the Experimental Transplantation and Immunology Center of the National Cancer Institute (NCI), part of the US National Institutes of Health (NIH), in Bethesda, USA. He is also a professor of medicine and oncology at the Georgetown University, Washington, DC.
Professor Pavletić is the founder of the Immunotherapy Task Force of the American Society of Hematology, and has published more than 300 scientific papers. He is very actively involved in connecting Croatian expatriates in the USA to their roots in Croatia. He is also a passionate pickleball enthusiast – a great fan of a sport that has increasingly been gaining traction all over the world, having surpassed tennis in the USA this year, in terms of the number of players.
Why did you decide to study medicine?
I went to a grammar school, where I took an interest in a wide range of things, and I liked working with people, so medicine was somehow a logical step. My parents were both biologists, which additionally motivated and directed me towards the natural sciences. As in a wise saying about life, I started by listening to my heart, and then some opportunities presented themselves and I took them. At the age of 23 I had already graduated with a degree in medicine, and while working at the University Hospital Centre Zagreb for the following ten years, I directed my work towards haematology by specialising and doing medical research in the field. During my work at the hospital, I went on a visit to the National Cancer Institute in Milan, which turned inspirational. It got me interested in cancer treatment, and, I can say without a doubt, directed my career as a scientist. In our part of the world, it was around the time when bone marrow transplants were started to be done at the Rebro hospital in Zagreb, which I found fascinating and exciting. I was part of the team lead by Professor Boris Labart, which operated at the highest, world-class level. Towards the end of the 1980s there was a congress in Dubrovnik, where Professor Dean Buckner from the Fred Hutchison Cancer Research Center invited me to join their team in Seattle. I took it as a once-in-a-lifetime opportunity because I wanted to do my subspecialisation at a world-class research facility. And Seattle was also a great choice at the time because of Professor E Donnall Thomas, who received the Nobel Prize for medicine in 1990 for his work on clinical allogeneic bone marrow transplantation. In the US, I subspecialised in two fields, which helped me scientifically further my knowledge in the topics that would be the focus of my interest during a great part of my career…
