Of all the wonders of modern medicine, none has captured the public imagination as fully as organ transplantation. Since 1967, when South African surgeon Christiaan Barnard kept 55-year-old Louis Washkansky alive for 18 additional days by giving him a heart taken from a 24-year-old woman killed in an auto accident, these spectacular feats of surgical legerdemain--often involving teams of physicians toiling meticulously for as long as 48 hours--have won headline coverage and created instant heroes of patients and doctors alike.
One of those heroes is Dr. Thomas Starzl, the doctor who, in the same year Barnard replaced Washkansky's heart, performed the...
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