The article mentions the first human-to-human heart transplant in these words: "It wasn’t until 1967 that the first human-to-human heart transplant took place a

The article mentions the first human-to-human heart transplant in these words: "It wasn’t until 1967 that the first human-to-human heart transplant took place at the Groote Schuur Hospital in Cape Town, South Africa, where a young surgeon named Christiaan Barnard was experimenting with pioneering surgical procedures." I still remember the day when his heart transplant operation in South Africa was front page news in Minneapolis. I told the news to my mom, a nurse, and she startled me by saying she knew Dr. Barnard. Christiaan Barnard did his surgical residency at the University of Minnesota in the 1950s, the same time my mom moved to Minnesota to work on the pioneering open-heart surgery the university was famous for in that era. A science writer, Leonard Engel, wrote a book about the heart surgery research at Minnesota called The Operation,[1] mentioning many of my mom's acquaintances by name. It was frightening to do any kind of heart surgery in the 1950s, when heart-lung machines to sustain a patient's circulation while the patient's heart was stopped were still new and in development. Barnard, on his part, used to tell the Minnesota surgical teams about his research in South Africa before coming to Minnesota. He was curious about how giraffe circulatory systems could boost blood up the long neck of a giraffe to the giraffe's brain, which requires some amazing adaptations of the usual vertebrate circulatory system. Dr. Norman Shumway, the third doctor to perform a human-to-human heart transplant, described as the first successful heart transplant in the United States, did his internship and residency at Minnesota.[2] He then moved to Stanford University and performed many dog-to-dog heart transplants before he first had opportunity to transplant a human heart. All the pioneers of heart surgery started out with animal experiments and worked for years on "simpler"--but still amazing, for the time--operations before their first human heart transplants. There was an international effort at the time to figure out ways to treat heart disease surgically. To this day, heart disease is still a leading cause of death, but age-adjusted death rates have dropped a lot in my lifetime,[3] in part because of prevention and in part because of successful surgical treatment. [1] http://catalog.hathitrust.org/Record/006711200 http://catalog.hathitrust.org/Record/006711200 [2] https://med.stanford.edu/news/all-news/2006/02/norman-shumway-heart-transplantation-pioneer-dies-at-83.html https://med.stanford.edu/news/all-news/2006/02/norman-shumwa... [3] https://www.nhlbi.nih.gov/files/docs/research/2012_ChartBook_508.pdf https://www.nhlbi.nih.gov/files/docs/research/2012_ChartBook...