The Evolution of Infant Heart Transplantation

Human heart transplantation! Incredible idea! The sort of moonshot that inhabited the dreams of 1950s- and 1960s-era cardiac surgeons worldwide. Perhaps as many as two dozen or more centers were actually experimenting with the concept, and the science was becoming irrepressible. By the 1960s, heart transplantation (HTx) had become a virtual obsession in the cardiac surgical laboratory at Stanford University.1 There, under the direction of Norman Shumway and Richard Lower, the operative procedure in experimental animals had become second nature.