Medicine: Surgery in the Heart

From opposite borders of the U.S., two major advances in the delicate art of heart surgery were reported last week. They made a dramatic contrast: in one operation the heart was kept beating during surgery; the other made a point of stopping it.

Bypassing the Heart. A 17-month-old boy at the Cleveland Clinic was the first human subject of the heart-stopping technique. Born with an opening in the septum (wall) between the right and left ventricles, his heart was unable to pump blood efficiently through his body because much of the blood pumped by the left ventricle leaked...