Medicine: Answer in a Dog's Lung

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 answer to the complex problem, in the lung of a dog.

Calvin Richmond, 13, had been badly crushed when he fell under a truck near Pine Bluff, Ark. In the membranes separating the chambers of his heart were three holes which allowed the blood to flow inefficiently back and forth. The University of Minnesota's team of heart repairmen, headed by Dr. Clarence Walton Lillehei, needed a "dry field" (the heart drained of blood) if they were to operate successfully. A Toronto-born colleague, Dr. Gilbert Campbell, 31, offered them the dog's lung to attain this. (He had already used lungs in 100 experimental operations with animals).

An hour before Calvin was to be ready, surgeons anesthetized a big dog (what breed, if any, is a secret) and removed an entire lung. The animal was then painlessly put to death with more anesthetic.

The doctors put the lung in a plastic cylinder, where it was hooked up to plastic hoses and to a mechanical pump.

When Calvin's chest was opened, Drs.

Lillehei and Richard Varco clamped off the great veins carrying the blood toward the heart, inserted a tube, and led the blood out to the input tube of the dog's lung. Inside its cylinder the lung was kept supplied with fresh oxygen. As the boy's blood coursed through the lung tissue, it gave up carbon dioxide and picked up fresh oxygen. Then it fell to the bottom of the cylinder. From the pool that formed there, another tube led the blood to a pump which boosted it back to Patient Richmond's aorta—the great artery in his chest.

Calvin Richmond was hooked up with the dead dog's lung for 20 minutes. The surgeons spent 15 of these performing delicate repair work inside the heart, which would have been impossible if they had been operating in a surging pool of blood.

This week Calvin was sitting up and feeling stronger.