Transplanting hearts and heads and everything else

This is excerpted from an editorial by the Chicago Tribune.

Fifty years ago last Sunday, Dr. Christiaan Barnard, a South African surgeon, lifted a human heart out of the chest of a young bank worker who had died in a car crash and installed it in a 55-year-old grocer who was near death.

The prognosis for Louis Washkansky, the world’s first heart transplant recipient? Doctors had no clue. “The longer Washkansky goes on, the better,” said a doctor who announced the Dec. 3, 1967, feat. Washkansky’s new heart lasted 18 days.

It would take another 16 years before the development of powerful anti-rejection medications helped boost the survival odds. By the time Barnard died in 2001, three-quarters of heart transplant patients survived five years or more, a figure that now approaches 80 percent.

We mark this moment not only to marvel at Barnard’s surgical skill and daring, but to note how the replacement of the human pump changed public perceptions about disease and death.

We live in the wonderful era of spare parts and of the medical know-how to install them. A bad liver? A malfunctioning kidney? A failing ticker? Lungs? Pancreas? All can be replaced, if a proper donor is found, and if the patient survives long enough.

Doctors continue to push transplant frontiers. A full face transplant. A penis transplant. An Italian doctor promises that the first human head transplant is “imminent.” Hmm. We’ll see about that one.

The future of transplants may not even involve human or animal parts, but cybernetic parts. Technologically enhanced beings are staples of science fiction.

Plenty of movies predict entire human minds downloaded and transplanted into android frames — the promise of near-immortality. We think the human body, that magnificent machine, will never grow obsolete. But as science fiction turns into science fact, we imagine the revolution pioneered by Christiaan Barnard and his contemporaries will yield ever greater wonders.