Surgery: First Heart Transplant

Surgeons at the University of Mississippi Medical Center in Jackson last week performed history's first recorded transplant of a heart into a human being. At first they refused to identify either donor or recipient, but later announced that the heart had come from a chimpanzee. In a three-hour operation, it had been transplanted into a man dying of irreversible heart disease. It beat for an hour, but proved too small, and the recipient died. In the fast-growing record of transplants, the initial failure was not nearly so significant as the fact that the surgeons' skills were equal to the bold attempt.