HEART TO HEART: THE RACE TO TRANSPLANT THE FIRST HUMAN HEART by McRae, Donald

ISBN: 9780743239950

Simon & Schuster 1 January 2006

Paperback 356 pages

The dramatic race to transplant the first human heart unravelled against a backdrop of searing tension, scientific brilliance, ethical controversy and racial strife. In 1967 four surgeons stood on the brink of medical immortality: Christian Barnard in South Africa; Norman Shumway at Stanford; Richard Lower in Virginia; and Adrian Kantrowitz in New York were all ready to proceed with the world's first human heart transplant.\n\nIt had been a neck-and-neck race to the finish. The three Americans had worked together as partners or rivals for years on the techniques that would prepare them for the moment they had the right donor and recipient. But they faced the challenge of a late entrant - the furiously ambitious South African, Dr Barnard, who had once worked with Shumway and then been captivated by the sight of Lower transplanting a dog heart in the research laboratory. He took their transplant techniques home to a country in the grip of apartheid; a country the rest of the word perceived as shockingly backwards.\n\nThe race culminated in the early hours of 3 December 1967 when, in a cramped operating theatre in a Cape Town hospital, Barnard stared into the empty chest cavity of Louis Washkansky; the world's first recipient of a viable donor heart. After eight years of daringly innovative research, success, when it finally came, generated the same media frenzy that would engulf Neil Armstrong's walk on the moon eighteen months later. Within hours the winning surgeon became a household name around the world. Yet he became a history-maker as much through good luck and a fateful twist of timing as surgical prowess.\n\nEvery Second Counts, written by the award-winning author Donald McRae and based on the intimate recollections of the surviving surgeons, retells for the first time the story of that tumultous race and the relationship between the four men who fought it. It is a true account that combines the utterly compelling - and often shocking - details of science with raw human drama as four men strove to conquer the greatest of medical challenges.