ONCE A HERO

Patients think of him as a guardian angel. Nurses call him a god. Virtually every week for the past three decades, pioneering trans-plant surgeon John Najarian -- an Olympian figure with the physique of a football player and the self-confidence to match -- has ventured into the operating room at the University of Minnesota Hospital to battle death. And more often than not, he has won. Patients he has saved can vividly recall the surge of hope they felt when Najarian gave them his simple vow: "I can do it."

His vision and skill have opened new frontiers for transplant surgery. Thanks to Najarian's work, diabetics are no longer told that transplants are too risky for them. And it was Najarian who proved that patients could safely receive kidneys donat-ed by living relatives. "We're not talking about just any doctor," says ethicist Arthur Caplan of the University of Pennsylvania, "but a giant of 20th century medicine."

So the shock and sorrow were profound last month when Najarian was indicted by a U.S. federal grand jury on 18 felony counts related to his work. Najarian, 67, who has pleaded not guilty, is accused of offenses ranging from embezzlement and income-tax evasion to conspiring to deceive the Food and Drug Administration. "When I heard the news," said Beverly Massegee of Ranger, Texas, who credits Najarian with saving her daughter's life, "I sobbed."

Najarian's trial, scheduled to begin later this year, is already shaping up to be a compelling courtroom drama. Prosecutors will seek evidence of duplicity from uni-versity administrators and government officials, while the defense is expected to summon an army of patients to portray a man motivated by nothing but the Hippocratic oath. "I'd go to the ends of the earth for him,'' says Charles Fiske of Bridgewater, Massachusetts, whose 11-month-old daughter Jamie in 1982 became the world's youngest recipient of a successful liver transplant performed by Najarian. Scott Jameson of Minneapolis, Minnesota, who recently marked the 25th anniversary of his kidney transplant, is already considering what he'd like to tell the jury. "I've seen one side of the man," he says, "and he's been nothing but good."

Najarian's life had seemed the very model of an American success story. The son of Armenian immigrants, he attended the University of California, Berkeley, on a football scholarship and later turned down an offer to play for the Chicago Bears in favor of going to medical school at the University of California at San Francisco. He stayed there for a residency in surgery, joined the faculty and soon became one of the first practitioners in a glamorous new field of medicine: organ transplantation.

First in San Francisco and later as chief of surgery at the University of Minnesota, Najarian focused on kidney transplants, struggling to improve the dismal success rate. Early on, only a third of patients survived more than three years. They were dying, Najarian knew, mainly because of tissue rejection. Their immune systems targeted transplanted organs as foreign and marshaled white blood cells to destroy the invaders. But Najarian saw a solution. With a colleague, he worked out a method for purifying a new drug called antilymphocyte globulin, or ALG, a potent cocktail of antibodies capable of countering the lethal reaction.