Stardate 20010902.0721 (On Screen): When the world's first heart transplant took place, performed by the just-deceased Christian Baarnard in South Africa, the world was electrified. And immediately top surgical teams all over the industrialized world wanted to get into the game, and within the first year many more were performed. Some people started calling Barnaard "the father of transplantation", which was nonsense. The enthusiasm quickly cooled, though, because the patients invariably died rapidly from organ rejection. While the operation involved in replacing a heart wasn't by any stretch trivial, it still turned out that it was the easy part; the surgeons were, you should pardon the expression, just plumbers. The
hard part turned out to be figuring out how to prevent rejection afterwards without killing the patients by shutting down their immune systems entirely, and that took a long time -- nearly twenty years, in fact, from that first heart transplant. The great advance that made transplantation practical was the development of
cyclosporine.
(discuss)
