Ignazio Marino

Ignazio Roberto Maria Marino (born 10 March 1955) is an Italian transplant surgeon who was Mayor of Rome from 2013 to 2015.

As a surgeon, he trained with Thomas Starzl, who had pioneered liver transplantion in humans.

The paper is still quoted today as a thorough study of this complex clinical syndrome; and the Pittsburgh Transplantation Institute at the University of Pittsburgh, directed by Dr. Thomas E. Starzl, the pioneer who in 1963 performed the first liver transplantion on a human being.

During his time in Cambridge, Dr. Marino published a paper on the reperfusion syndrome occurring during liver transplantion (Transplantation, 1985).

Pittsburgh was then by far the most active Liver transplantation center in the world: for example, in 1990-1991 alone, more than 1,000 liver transplantion were performed at the Pittsburgh Transplantation Institute.

In Pittsburgh, Dr. Marino completed an American Society of Transplant Surgeons approved multi-organ transplant fellowship under the direct leadership of Dr. Starzl and was hired by him as an attending physician and a Faculty member in 1991.

In 1992–1993, as a member of Thomas Starzl's team at the University of Pittsburgh in the United States, he conducted two baboon-to-human liver transplants.

In 1992 Ignazio Marino was appointed associate director of the National Liver Transplant Center of the United States Department of Veterans Affairs of Pittsburgh, then the only Liver transplantation department of the Government of the United States.

Marino was a member of the surgical team which in June 1992 and January 1993 performed two baboon-to-human liver xenotransplants in a clinical trial coordinated by Starzl.

He founded the ISMETT organ transplant center in Palermo, Sicily; Marino was the CEO and the Director of ISMETT from 1997 until 2002.

In 1997 Marino founded the ISMETT (Mediterranean Institute for Transplantation and Advanced Specialized Therapies) organ transplant center in Palermo, Sicily.

Marino was the CEO and the Director of ISMETT from 1997 until 2002, the first liver transplantion center in Sicily, founded through a partnership between the University of Pittsburgh Medical Center and the Ministry of Health of the Government of Italy Ministry of Health (Italy)of the Category:Government of Italy.

In 2001 he performed the first organ transplant in Italy for a person with HIV.

The patient lived for 18 years with full function of the transplanted organ.

In 2001 he performed the first organ transplant in Italy on a person with HIV undergoing highly active antiretroviral therapy—a kidney transplant made in response to a personal request from the patient himself (along with the donor, his father), who had been turned down by other Italian transplant centres.

A clinical success, the operation sparked an institutional dispute in Italy at the time.

In 2002 Marino moved to Philadelphia at the Thomas Jefferson University.

In 2005 he published a book with Einaudi ("Le Vele" series) entitled Credere e curare ("Treating and Believing"); the book deals with the medical profession and the influence that faith, seen as a religious creed but also as compassion, solidarity, and empathy towards all human beings, has upon it.

From 2009 to 2015 he was a member of the center-left Democratic Party and held a seat in the Italian Senate from 2006 until his election as mayor of Rome.

Ignazio Marino is the recipients of several international medical awards, including the 2010 Award for contributions to the fight against AIDS; Honorary Doctor of Science degree (2015) at the Thomas Jefferson University; the Longmire Professorship of the David Geffen School of Medicine at UCLA and the Longmire Surgical Society Society.

Marino has personally performed over 650 transplants.

Marino delivered more than 700 international scientific lectures and is the author of over 500 peer-review articles and has authored several scientific books.

He was elected Mayor of Rome in June 2013.

Shortly after his victory in the elections, he was approached by an organized crime network that rigged public contracts and embezzled funds.

As a civil rights activist, on October 18, 2014, as Mayor of Rome, Marino registered the marriages of 16 same-sex couples.

Same-sex marriages were illegal in Italy at the time, and by registering the marriages, Mayor Marino wanted to force the hand of national legislators to clarify a deepening legal muddle around same-sex unions.

Marino took the case to prosecutors, starting the 2014 Rome corruption scandal.

In 2015, at the beginning of October, the opposition parties of M5S and Fratelli d'Italia, started a false scandal against Mayor Marino.

On 12 October 2015, Marino resigned from the Office of Mayor to prove his innocence.

Subsequently, on October 29 he retired the resignation.

Nevertheless, on 30 October he was ousted from his position after 26 of the 48 members of the City Council resigned.

Same-sex civil unions were eventually legalized in Italy in 2016.

In the United States he has held chairs as Professor of Surgery at the University of Pittsburgh and at the Thomas Jefferson University in Philadelphia.

On 7 October 2016, the Judge of Preliminary Hearing of Rome (G.U.P. Roma) acquitted Prof. Marino at the first instance over the allegations of embezzlement, fraud, and forgery.

On 9 April 2019, the Italian Supreme Court (Corte di Cassazione) definitively confirmed the first acquittal.

It stated that the Mayor's expenses were made in the interests of Rome for institutional aims and that the alleged facts "did not take place" according to article 530 of the Italian C.P.P., ruling that even the opening of the investigation was not necessary.

Currently, Ignazio Marino is Professor of Surgery at the Thomas Jefferson University, School of Medicine, and holds the role of Executive Vice President for both Thomas Jefferson University and Jefferson Health.

Marino was born in Genoa to a Sicilian father and a Swiss mother and is the oldest of three children (he has two sisters).

He graduated in Medicine and Surgery from the Università Cattolica del Sacro Cuore in Rome.

Board-certified in General and Vascular Surgery, he spent 4 years training in the 2 most prestigious transplant centers in the world: the Transplantation Institute of the University of Cambridge, England (then the only liver transplantion division in Europe), directed by Prof. Sir Roy Calne.