Two Hearts, One Blood

When an engineer finds something wrong with a pump or a filter, he can order a new one. Doctors dealing with the human blood system cannot. This week researchers at the University of California announced that they have found a new way of getting around the difficulty: they have linked two people together, through their arteries, so that both have a common circulation like Siamese twins.

In earlier attempts to do this, doctors relied on mechanical pumps to boost the blood on its way. At California's medical school, blood pulsing down each man's main thigh artery is shunted into the corresponding artery of the other. The blood from the partner is then led back to the same thigh, lower down, to form a complete circuit.

The California researchers developed the method to prove their theory that leukemia is not so much the result of a wild growth of new white blood cells as of a failure of the lungs to destroy the old ones (TIME, Feb. 5). They tried it only on pairs of volunteers hopelessly ill, e.g., one of leukemia, the other of tissue cancer*

None of the leukemia patients improved for more than a little while: they could not be linked with their partners indefinitely. But in some tests, two blood streams were pooled for as long as 26 hours. Among possible future uses:

P: In delicate heart operations, where the patient's heart might be bypassed and his blood-pumping taken over entirely by a partner.

P:In cases of kidney and liver damage, where the injured organ might be spared part of its burden for brief, restorative rest.

P:In radiation sickness, since experiments have already .shown that animals given lethal doses of radiation can recover if blood-linked with normal animals.

* The first volunteer ever to receive leukemia blood, a lifer in Sing Sing (later paroled) exchanged 18 pints in a series of transfusions with an eight-year-old girl (TIME, June 13, 1949), had no ill effects.

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