Bold Exchange

On a winter's day in Philadelphia, six years ago, two sisters rang the bell of a young surgeon named Michael John Bennett. The older girl, 25, was enormously fat; she weighed well over 200 pounds. The younger, 14, was slender. Both had ovarian trouble. The thin girl menstruated excessively, the fat one hardly at all. No amount of glandular extracts had helped them. Dr. Bennett observed the girls carefully for a long period of time. Then he decided on a bold experiment, which he had tried on animals, but which had never before been successfully tried on human beings--an exchange of ovary tissue between the sisters.

First he made sure they were of the same blood grouping, so the transplants would be well-nourished. In adjoining operating rooms in Hahnemann Hospital, Dr. Bennett operated on one sister, Dr. William Martin Sylvis on the other. They anesthetized them, opened the abdominal cavities of each sister, pulled back the muscles, exposed their almond-size ovaries (see cut). Snipping out three-fourths of one ovary from each girl, they placed them in a warm salt solution. Then they switched the little grafts, stitching them snug to the ovary stems.

Within a few weeks the girls were up & about. After the operation they were given no hormones or glandular treatment of any kind. Soon their glands began to function normally for the first time. The fat girl lost almost 100 pounds, the thin girl put on weight. Today they are healthy, happy and married.

Heartened by this success. Dr. Bennett and Gynecologist Newlin Fell Paxson began to make transplants between other women with "complementary" ovarian trouble. Last week they told the Philadelphia Obstetrical Society of their results.

To date they have operated on 80 women, with no deaths, only one partial failure. Last year one of their patients, who had been sterile for ten years, became pregnant after her operation. Her baby was delivered by Caesarean section, and the doctors proudly showed a group of colleagues her grafted ovary, pink and glistening, with firm, ruddy blood vessels. Her partner expects a baby in four months. So far three other patients have had babies, five expect them.

Ovarian grafts, the doctors said, should be made only when all other treatment has failed. It is very important to make sure that the ovary is at fault, and not other endocrine glands. A difficult part of the proceeding is finding the proper partners to swap ovaries. The search may take years.

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