The Heart and Both Lungs

Edward Falk, a 43-year-old New Jersey carpenter, could not work last year because of shortness of breath. By early October he could not even summon up enough wind to get out of bed. His complaint was emphysema, a condition in which the myriad tiny sacs on the inner surface of the lungs become blistered, scarred and fibrous. With their loss of elasticity, they lose the capacity to exchange carbon dioxide and life-sustaining oxygen. Once considered an uncommon disease, emphysema is now being diagnosed much more often. In most cases, as in Falk's, the underlying cause is unknown, though the condition is aggravated, as in his case, by smoking. Because of the lungs' inefficiency, the overworked heart is starved of oxygen, so it, too, becomes enlarged and diseased.

Last week physicians at Manhattan's New York Hospital concluded that no known treatment could help Falk and that he might die any day. His one slender hope lay in an operation performed only once before, and then unsuccessfully: transplantation of a heart and two lungs. Then a 50-year-old woman was admitted after suffering a hemorrhagic stroke. Her blood-cell types were a fairly good match with Falk's. As she lay dying, Surgeon-in-Chief C. Walton Lillehei alerted his team. They spent Christmas morning transplanting her heart and lungs, including both bronchi and the lower third of the windpipe. Because the surgical procedures required were more difficult than those for heart transplants, the operation took 3 1/2 hours.

So far, the only long-term survivor with another man's lung but with his own heart has been Alois Vereecken, a Belgian metalworker who lived ten months after a 1968 transplant. Edward Falk quickly regained consciousness, his new lungs took up their work of oxygenation, and at week's end his condition was described as good.

This file is automatically generated by a robot program, so reader's discretion is required.