Leonard Bailey
Leonard Lee Bailey is surgeon in chief at Loma Linda University Children’s Hospital. He placed the heart of a baboon into the chest of “Baby Fae,” an infant born with a severe heart defect known as hypoplastic left heart syndrome, on October 26, 1984. Baby Fae only lived twenty-one days before she died, but the operation marked the beginning of infant heart transplants, although baboon hearts were not used again. Bailey continued to pioneer infant heart transplantation. “Baby Moses,” transplanted by Bailey in 1985, is the oldest living infant heart-transplant recipient.
Earl Bakken
Earl E. Bakken was an American engineer, businessman and philanthropist. He founded Medtronic, where he developed the first external, battery-operated, transistorized, wearable artificial pacemaker in 1957. Bakken had a long-held fascination with electricity and electronics. A self-described “nerd,” Bakken designed a rudimentary electroshock weapon in school to fend off bullies. After earning a bachelor of science in electrical engineering in 1948, he studied electrical engineering with a minor in mathematics at the University of Minnesota Graduate School. Post-World War II hospitals were just starting to employ electronic equipment but did not have staff to maintain and repair them. With his brother-in-law, Palmer Hermundslie, he formed Medtronic (the combination of “medical” and “electronic”) in a small garage, primarily working with the University of Minnesota hospital.
Over the next several years, Bakken and Medtronic worked with other doctors to develop fully implantable pacemakers, but they also veered toward bankruptcy. He borrowed money that kept Medtronic going.
Bakken retired from Medtronic in 1989 and moved to a nine-acre estate in the Kona District of Hawaii. In 1996 he helped to dedicate the North Hawaii Community Hospital and has been active there ever since, working to combine Eastern and Western approaches to medicine to develop a more holistic approach to health care. Bakken died on October 21, 2018 at the age of ninety-four.
Christiaan Barnard
Christiaan Neethling Barnard matriculated from Beaufort West High School in South Africa in 1940 and studied medicine at the University of Cape Town, graduating in 1945. He did his internship and residency at the Groote Schuur Hospital in Cape Town. In 1956, he received a two-year scholarship, which he used for postgraduate training in cardiothoracic surgery at the University of Minnesota, under Walt Lillehei. Norman Shumway and Matt Paneth were there at the same time. Upon returning to South Africa in 1958, Barnard was appointed cardiothoracic surgeon at the Groote Schuur Hospital and did the first human-to-human heart transplant there in December 1967. He retired in 1983. Barnard became obsessed with staving off old age, and his reputation suffered when he promoted Glycel, an expensive “antiaging” skin cream, whose approval was soon withdrawn by the US Food and Drug Administration. He also spent time as a research adviser to the Clinique la Prairie, in Switzerland, where controversial “rejuvenation therapy” was practiced. He died on September 2, 2001, while on holiday in Cyprus at the age of seventy-eight, apparently from an asthma attack.
Denton Cooley
Denton Arthur Cooley graduated in 1941 from the University of Texas at Austin and began his medical education at the University of Texas Medical Branch in Galveston. He completed his medical degree and his surgical training at the Johns Hopkins School of Medicine in Baltimore, Maryland, where he also did his internship. At Johns Hopkins, he worked with Alfred Blalock and assisted in the first “blue baby” procedure to correct an infant’s congenital heart defect. He completed his residency at Johns Hopkins and remained there as an instructor in surgery. In 1950 he went to London to work with Lord Russell Brock at the Brompton Hospital. After London he moved to Houston, Texas, where he worked with Michael E. DeBakey at the Baylor College of Medicine. In 1960, Cooley moved his practice to St. Luke’s Episcopal Hospital while continuing to teach at Baylor. In 1962 he founded the Texas Heart Institute with private funds and, following a dispute with DeBakey, resigned his position at Baylor in 1969. He was the first heart surgeon to implant an artificial heart in a man, Haskell Karp, who lived for sixty-five hours. Cooley authored or coauthored more than fourteen hundred scientific articles and twelve books. He was awarded the Presidential Medal of Freedom by Ronald Reagan in 1984. Dr. Cooley died on November 18, 2016, aged ninety-six.
Pat Daily
Patrick Daily obtained a bachelor’s degree in biology from the University of Oklahoma and his medical degree from the University of Chicago in 1962. He did a cardiovascular surgery residency at Stanford University and then went to San Diego in 1973. He worked at UCSD and also at Sharp Memorial Hospital but moved to Sharp exclusively in 1989. In his midsixties he developed Alzheimer’s disease, and he died on April 25, 2008, aged seventy-one.
Terence English
Sir Terence English was born in South Africa and initially became a mining engineer. He later decided to study medicine and did some of his early training under Matt Paneth at the Brompton Hospital. He was consultant cardiothoracic surgeon at Papworth Hospital and Addenbrooke’s Hospital, Cambridge, from 1973 to 1995. He performed Britain’s first successful heart transplant in August 1979, after which Papworth became one of the leading heart and lung transplant centers in Europe. He was president of the Royal College of Surgeons from 1989 to 1992; master of St. Catharine’s College, Cambridge, from 1993 to 2000; and president of the British Medical Association from 1995 to 1996. He was knighted in 1991. English received the Lifetime Achievement Award from the Society for Cardiothoracic Surgery in Great Britain and Ireland in 2009, and the Lifetime Achievement Award from the International Society for Heart and Lung Transplantation in 2014. He turned eighty-six in October 2018.
F. John Lewis
Floyd John Lewis was the closest friend of C. Walton Lillehei. After World War II they worked together at the University of Minnesota under Owen Wangensteen. On September 2, 1952, he performed the first direct-vision open-heart surgery, using hypothermia to preserve the brain function of his five-year-old patient, Jacqueline Johnson. In 1956, Lewis moved to Northwestern University, where he became the first full-time member of the faculty of surgery. After being passed over for the chair of surgery position at Northwestern, Lewis departed for Santa Barbara in 1976 and retired from surgery. He died in Santa Barbara on September 20, 1993, aged seventy-seven.
Walt Lillehei
Clarence Walton Lillehei received his premedical and medical training at the University of Minnesota, earning an undergraduate degree in 1939 and his MD in 1942. During World War II, Lillehei served in the Army Medical Corps in Europe, rising to the rank of lieutenant colonel and earning a Bronze Star for meritorious service. In 1945, he returned to the University of Minnesota and completed his residency under the direction of Owen Wangensteen, then chairman of the Department of Surgery. He pioneered the first cardiac surgical procedures and became known as the father of open-heart surgery. When John Najarian succeeded Wangensteen, Lillehei left to become professor of surgery and chairman of the Department of Surgery at Cornell University Medical Center and surgeon in chief at New York Hospital. There he undertook a series of multiorgan transplants, including the second clinical transplant of a heart and both lungs in 1969. He died on July 5, 1999, in Minneapolis, of prostate cancer, aged eighty.
Richard Lower
Richard Rowland Lower attended Cornell University in 1955. While at Stanford he worked with Norman Shumway to develop many of the early experimental techniques for heart transplantation. He subsequently left Stanford to head the cardiac program at the Medical College of Virginia. Lower retired in 1989 to Montana, where he raised cattle. He died of pancreatic cancer on May 17, 2008, aged seventy-eight.
Abdool “Babs” Moossa
Babs Moossa completed his medical school and residency training with honors at the University of Liverpool and United Liverpool Hospitals. In 1972, he was awarded a fellowship in surgery at the Johns Hopkins Hospital and later was recruited to join the faculty at the University of Chicago. In Chicago, he rose
quickly to the positions of professor of surgery, vice chairman of the Department of Surgery, chief of the general surgical service and director of surgical research. Moossa then became chairman of surgery at the University of California, San Diego, a post in which he served for twenty-five years. He died on July 17, 2013, from liver cancer, likely a complication from a viral infection sustained after inadvertently pricking his finger during surgery on a patient with hepatitis. He was seventy-three.
John Najarian
John Najarian graduated from the University of California, San Francisco, with a medical degree in 1952 and did his surgical residency there. He then had fellowships at the University of Pittsburg and the Scripps Clinic and Research Foundation in San Diego. He succeeded Owen Wangensteen as the chief of surgery at the University of Minnesota in 1967. For many years he oversaw the sale of a preparation of antilymphocyte serum out of the Department of Surgery, which was illegal under FDA rules. In 1993 he was asked by the university president, Nils Hasselmo, to resign as chairman of the Department of Surgery. In October of that year, the FBI and IRS searched the offices of the Department of Surgery Associates (DSA), Najarian’s private practice, seizing his business and financial records, as well as those of DSA’s chief financial officer, James Coggins. Coggins was subsequently fired and the process to remove Najarian from his tenured faculty position began. Najarian lost his privileges to conduct research involving human subjects. In February 1995 Najarian resigned from the University Medical School faculty. He was subsequently tried on twenty-two counts of fraud, tax evasion, embezzlement, and other charges. A well-known and locally beloved figure, he was acquitted on all counts that had not already been dismissed by a friendly judge. Najarian lives in Minneapolis. He turned ninety-one in December 2018.
Matt Paneth
Matt Paneth qualified as a doctor at Oxford University, where he worked until he became a resident in surgery at the Brompton Hospital in London. In 1956 he was awarded a Fulbright scholarship and traveled to America to work for a year with Walt Lillehei in Minneapolis. Norman Shumway was a resident there at the same time. After returning to the Brompton, Paneth worked for Lord Brock as senior registrar. Upon Brock’s retirement in 1959, he was appointed to the staff of the Brompton, where he served as consultant surgeon for almost thirty years. When he was ninety-one, a medical examination showed he had lung cancer. He refused treatment and died ten days later, on September 1, 2011.
Ken Porter
Kenneth Porter graduated from St. Mary’s Hospital medical school in 1948 and became chair in pathology at St. Mary’s in 1967. In the 1950s he worked with Roy Calne, who was studying renal transplantation in dogs. Porter began to document in detail what happened when a kidney transplant was rejected. No one had done this before. Porter later collaborated on the rejection problem with Thomas Starzl, a pioneer in liver transplantation. Porter died on April 13, 2013, aged eighty-eight years.
Norman Shumway
Norman Shumway received his heart transplant in the US a month later. He went on to make the operation a standard procedure after virtually all other surgeons had abandoned it. He is widely regarded as the father of heart transplantation. He was the first recipient of the Lifetime Achievement Award by the International Society for Heart and Lung Transplantation. He died of cancer on February 10, 2006, in Palo Alto, the day after his eighty-third birthday.
Thomas Starzl
Thomas Earl Starzl attended Northwestern University Medical School in Chicago, where in 1950 he received a master of science degree in anatomy and in 1952 earned both a PhD in neurophysiology and an MD with distinction. He performed the first human National Medal of Science by President George W. Bush at the White House in 2006. In celebration of his eightieth birthday, the University of Pittsburgh renamed one of its newest medical research buildings the Thomas E. Starzl Biomedical Science Tower. Dr. Starzl died on March 4, 2017, aged ninety.
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* Biographical information has been supplied to the author by all respective parties.
BIBLIOGRAPHY AND SUGGESTED READING
Bannister, Roger. Twin Tracks. London: The Robson Press, 2015.
Bonser, Robert S., L S Fragomeni, Jolene M Kriett, M P Kaye and Stuart W. Jamieson. “Technique of clinical double-lung transplantation.” The Journal of heart transplantation 7 4 (1988): 298-303.
Greenberg, Mark J., Donald L. Janssen, Stuart W. Jamieson, Abraham Rothman, David D. Frankville, Sheila D. Cooper, Jolene M. Kriett, Pat K. Adsit, Amy L. Shima, Patrick J. Morris, and Meg Sutherland-Smith. “Surgical Repair of an Atrial Septal Defect in a Juvenile Sumatran Orangutan (Pongo Pygmaeus Sumatraensis).” Journal of Zoo and Wildlife Medicine 30, no. 2 (1999): 256-61. http://www.jstor.org/stable/20095854.
Heaman, E. A. St. Mary’s: The History of a London Teaching Hospital. London: McGill-Queen’s University Press, 2003.
Jamieson, Stuart W., Nelson A. Burton, Charles P. Bieber, Bruce A. Reitz, Philip E. Oyer, Edward B. Stinson, Norman E. Shumway. “Survival of cardiac allografts in rats treated with Cyclosporin A.” Surgical Forum 30 (1979): 289–91. https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/395684
Jamieson, Stuart W., Nelson A. Burton, Charles P. Bieber, Bruce A. Reitz, Philip E. Oyer, Edward B. Stinson, Norman E. Shumway. “Cardiac allograft survival in primates treated with Cyclosporin A.” Lancet 313, no. 8115 (1979): 545. doi: 10.1016/S0140-6736(79)90959-0
Jamieson Stuart W., Vicent Gaudiani, Bruce A. Reitz, Philip E. Oyer, Edward B. Stinson, Norman E. Shumway. “Operative treatment of an unresectable tumor of the left ventricle.” The Journal of Thoracic and Cardiovascular Surgery 81 (1981): 797–9. https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/6261046
Jamieson, Stuart W., Edward B. Stinson, Phillip E Oyer, J. C. Baldwin and Norman E. Shumway. “Operative technique for heart-lung transplantation.” The Journal of thoracic and cardiovascular surgery 87 6 (1984): 930-5.
Jamieson, Stuart, David P. Kapelanski, Naohide Sakakibara, Gerard Manecke, Patricia Thistlethwaite, Kim Kerr, Richard N. Channick, Peter Fedullo, William R Auger. “Pulmonary endarterectomy: experience and lessons learned in 1,500 cases.” The Annals of Thoracic Surgery 76 (2003): 1457-62. doi:10.1016/S0003-4975(03)00828-2.
Jamieson, Stuart W., Edward B. Stinson, and Norman E. Shumway. “Cardiac Transplantation In 150 Patients at Stanford University.” The British Medical Journal 1, no. 6156 (1979): 93-95. http://www.jstor.org/stable/25430655.
Miller, G. Wayne. King of Hearts: The True Story of the Maverick Who Pioneered Open Heart Surgery. New York: Times Books, 2000.
Starzl, Thomas E. The Puzzle People: Memoirs of a Transplant Surgeon. Pittsburgh: University of Pittsburgh Press, 1992.
Acknowledgements
I am grateful to several friends who reviewed an early version of the manuscript, but especially to William Souder who worked closely with me and made important suggestions.
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