A Heart for a Heart

Surgeons have been making hopeful progress toward their dream of perfecting a mechanical heart, but last week it appeared that for many cases nature had beaten them to the answer. If the patient is a child suffering from an inborn heart defect, the University of Minnesota reported, the best substitute for the human heart is another heart. Doctors have so used it in three operations, hooking up a child-patient's blood flow with the father's so that the father's heart and lungs do the work for both. This can go on for half an hour, at least. In that precious time the surgeons can operate to utmost advantage, in a "dry field."

The daring technique of "controlled cross transfusion" as a possible aid in heart operations had been under study for years by a team of eleven Minneapolis doctors, headed by Surgeon Clarence Walton Lillehei. Not until six weeks ago did the Minneapolis doctors, finally satisfied that they had taken every precaution possible against its many dangers, feel ready to try it. Their first patient was Gregory Glidden, 13 months, who had an opening between the ventricles of his heart. The donor's blood had to match the baby's, and the doctors decided that his father's was suitable. As the infant lay on one operating table, his father was on another parallel to it. A surgeon tapped the main artery in the father's thigh, led the freshly oxygenated blood to a pump which boosted it on its way to a tube set into an artery in Gregory's chest. After it had coursed through his system, the blood flowed out from one of the great veins near the heart through more tubes and pumps into a vein in the father's thigh. Its passage through his heart and lungs completed the circuit.

Dr. Lillehei took 17 minutes to close the opening in Gregory's heart, believes it is the first time this delicate operation had been done with the heart in plain view and "dry," though still beating because its muscle was getting a full blood supply. Gregory stood the operation well but died a few days later of pneumonia (to which children with such heart defects are especially liable).

Since then the same team has operated on Bradley Mehrman, 3, and Pamela

Schmidt, 5, in each case with the father as a substitute heart. Both youngsters were doing well this week, and the fathers have shown no ill effects.

Thousands of children are born in the U.S. each year with heart defects which, uncorrected, condemn them to early death or lifelong invalidism. Half of these cases can be restored to normal health, the Minnesota researchers hope, by operations that cross transfusion makes possible.

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