Word: barnard
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South African Surgeon Christiaan Neethling Barnard is a hard act to follow. Seven years ago this week, he performed history's first transplantation of a human heart. Last week he staged a surgical spectacular of about the same order: Barnard gave a patient a second heart and left the old one, or most of it, in place. For a while, at least, both hearts were working...
...patient was Ivan Taylor, 58, an engineer who entered Cape Town's Groote Schuur Hospital early in November. "He was in a hell of a mess," says Barnard. "Absolutely a desperate man." The problem was that the patient's heart was not all of a piece. Of its two heavy-duty pumping chambers, the right ventricle was strong and driving blood efficiently to the lungs; it was the left ventricle, which propels oxygenated blood to the arterial system, that was diseased and failing. Christiaan and his surgeon brother Marius decided that what Taylor needed was an assistant left...
...surgeons to use the child's heart. During the transplant-implant operation, which began at midnight and lasted five hours, Taylor was on the heart-lung machine, which maintains the patient's circulation, allowing his own heart to be stopped during the delicate operation. Only then did Barnard discover how desperate his condition had been: "His left ventricle was nothing but a bag of fibrous tissue." Barnard cut away 45% of this diseased heart muscle, partly to make room for the implant. He placed the donor heart piggyback on Taylor's own, left side to left side...
...heart a boost. No artificial pacemakers were used, so the two hearts kept beating at their own rates; the child donor's, without connections to the nervous system, pulsed faster than the patient's own. "We're working on developing a pacemaker to synchronize them," said Barnard. "We'll pick up the impulse from the one heart and stimulate the other with that, so the two will beat synchronously...
Married. Bob Woodward, 31, Washington Post's investigative Watergate reporter; and Frances Barnard, 28, reporter for the Fort Worth Star Telegram; both for the second tune; in Washington, D.C. Woodward's enterprising colleague, Carl Bernstein, who only learned of the secret marriage with an hour to spare, provided boutonnieres niched from a hotel flowerpot. ∎ Died. Cornelius Ryan, 54, bestselling chronicler of World War II (The Longest Day, The Last Battle, A Bridge Too Far); of cancer; in Manhattan. Born in Dublin, Ryan studied the violin at the Irish Academy of Music before becoming a war correspondent...