Christoph Broelsch (14 September 1944, in Hanau, Germany – 12 February 2019 in Düsseldorf) was a German surgeon and former high school teacher. Broelsch pioneered the liver transplant surgery, when he performed the first successful liver transplant on a child in 1989. Life Broelsch grew up with his five siblings in Bremen. His father, Werner Broelsch (1910-2010) was a state youth pastor. By the end of the 1950s, the family moved to Berlin. After graduating from high school in 1963, Broelsch went on to study medicine in Cologne, Erlangen, and Düsseldorf. Afterwards he started working under Prof. Dr. Rudolf Pichlmayr at the Hannover Medical School, where he worked for 10 years before moving to Chicago. He then moved to the University of Chicago in 1984 to lead the Medical Center’s liver transplant program. In November 1989, Broelsch’s team was the first to report a living-related-donor liver transplant. The donor was a 29 year old mother who donated her left lateral segment to her 21 month old daughter. Previously, Broelsch had developed a liver division procedure in which one donor liver could be used for two recipients, so-called "split liver". In live donation, only a part (segment) of the liver is removed from the healthy donor and implanted in the sick person. The procedure is based on the fact that parts of the liver can grow back into a complete organ. The difficulty is to split the organ of the healthy donor in such a way that no vital blood vessels are cut. Since 1999, new imaging techniques and 3D visualization of internal organs have significantly improved safety. On August 31, 1989, a few months before the first such operation, Broelsch and colleagues published a paper in the New England Journal of Medicine to explain their medical and ethical reasoning as they began to select potential patients and donors. “We propose to transplant a liver lobe from a living donor — the parent of the recipient — to a non-critically ill infant with advanced liver disease,” they wrote. Over the next five years, the University of Chicago and Broelsch’s team became the leaders in adult to pediatric living donor liver transplantation, performing 78 of these operations, representing close to half of all those performed throughout the United States. Their success stimulated many surgeons throughout the world to develop similar programs while others worked to solve the technical problems that soon led