Minneapolis surgeons had been getting good results with their "cross-circulation technique" for delicate surgery inside the heart—using another human being's heart and lungs to take the load off the patient's while they operated (TIME, May 10). But it was a tricky business, and they would have liked to cut out the danger to a second human being. Why not a mechanical heart and lungs, which several research teams have tried? For one thing, the Minneapolis doctors reasoned, strange things can happen to human blood in a mechanical oxygenating system; it may undergo mysterious changes. Last week they thought they had an...
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