Transplants: Two Postscripts in Houston

Two controversial transplants performed recently in Houston were criticized on the grounds that they involved the application to human patients of techniques that had not been proved safe and effective in experiments with animals. Last week both cases had sequels:

> When Dr. Denton A. Cooley implanted an artificial heart in a man last month, he acted without prior review by the appropriate committees of Baylor University College of Medicine, the college's board chairman charged. In a letter to the National Heart Institute, Baylor's Leonard F. McCollum said that the heart device had been developed under a grant from NHI, and was therefore subject to federal guidelines governing experimental application to human subjects. McCollum informed the institute that Dr. Domingo Liotta, the Argentine-born researcher who worked on the device, "has been suspended from all activities in the artificial-heart program at Baylor." Cooley himself, said an NHI spokesman, was not subject to the federal guidelines because he had no grant from the institute. Thus, any disciplinary action against him would be up to Baylor officials. None has been reported.

>In the other disputed case, John Madden, 55, the world's first recipient of an eye transplant involving substantially more than the cornea, left Houston's Methodist Hospital and went home. Dr. Conard Moore had grafted the front part of a donor eye to the remainder of Madden's right eye. Although Madden cannot even distinguish light from dark through the transplant, still he credited Moore with "a miracle."