Turning Points: Heart To Heart

The world's first heart-transplant surgeon reflects on risk taking, lucky setbacks, partying and sex

My father was a missionary among the colored, or mixed-race, people of Beaufort West in an area of scrubland that is South Africa's version of Arizona. That's where I was born, and now the house where I was born is a museum. Next door is the church where my father preached, my mother played the organ and I pumped the bellows for it. Maybe that's where, subconsciously, I started getting interested in the pump, which is all the heart is, after all. I can remember as a boy when they rang a big bell in Beaufort West at 9 o'clock, and...

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