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The recipient baby, whose identity was kept secret, was a healthy pink as his donated heart pumped normally oxygenated blood. Other criteria for the patient's recovery all seemed favorable. But after 6½ hours, the heart suddenly stopped. There had been no time for the rejection mechanism to intrude—that takes days or weeks, and is, besides, less likely to be severe in infants. Dr. Kantrowitz, drawn and shaken, conceded that he and his colleagues had no idea why they had failed in their attempt "to make one whole individual out of two individuals who did not have a chance of survival." The autopsy indicated no surgical error; microscopic findings, which may disclose the actual cause of death, will take weeks.
No Regrets. The donor baby's understanding parents were soon identified as Attorney Keith Bashaw, 40, and his wife Celeste, 31, who live in Cherry Hill, N.J., across the Delaware from Philadelphia. They have two healthy children, aged 7 and 5. The anencephalic third was delivered by caesarean section. Said Bashaw: "We thought we could turn our sorrow into somebody else's hope. We're sorry it didn't work —but we're not sorry we did it."
Edward Darvall had still less reason to regret his decision. Not only was Denise's heart working in Washkansky's chest, but her right kidney was transplanted to a Colored* boy, ten-year-old Jonathan Van Wyk, and was functioning normally at week's end. Washkansky was making wisecracks: "I'm a Frankenstein now. I've got somebody else's heart." (And making the common error of confusing the fictional Dr. Frankenstein with the monster he made.) Washkansky was well enough to go through a radio interview with a doctor. He ate well, and said his only complaint was that he was aching from being kept too long lying in bed.
Dr. Barnard was talking of sending Washkansky home in a couple of weeks. In this he could have been overoptimistic. The possibility remained that he might be as cruelly disappointed as Dr. Kantrowitz by the sudden failure of the transplant. At best, there could be endless complications. Yet the mere performance of the operation set a milestone along the endless road of man's struggle against disability.
Slippery Stitching. Surgeons have dreamed for centuries of making just the sort of replacement of a diseased or injured limb or organ that Dr. Barnard made last week. But when they tried to make their dreams reality, they found themselves encaged by invisible but seemingly invincible forces, mysterious beyond their understanding. Italian surgeons during the Renaissance occasionally succeeded in repairing a sword-slashed nose or ear with flesh from the patient's own arm, but got nowhere with person-to-person grafts. The first widely attempted transplants were blood transfusions, from lamb to man or man to man. Almost all failed—in many cases, fatally—and no one knew why a few succeeded. Skin grafts, often attempted after burns, slough off after a few weeks unless they are taken from another part of the patient's own body. The first consistently successful human homografts (between two individuals of the same species), beginning in 1905, involved the cornea—the transparent, plastic covering of the eyeball which has no blood circulation.