Part One: The Paths Less Traveled

Stanford University had decided to move its medical school, Stanford-Lane, San Francisco to the site of its main campus in Palo Alto, California. Stanford - Lane had been a respected, clinically oriented medical school. The move signaled primarily closer ties to the growing research faculty in the other disciplines. By 1959, few established surgeons had transferred to the suburban site. The dean of the new Stanford school, Robert Alway, M.D., had told Dong and other inductees at the 1959 Alpha Omega Alpha honor medical society induction dinner to consider Stanford's new direction in medical research at a new facility in Palo Alto.

The incoming chairman of surgery was to be J. Garrott Allen, M.D., an academic from the University of Chicago whose credentials included editing a textbook of surgery and studies on plasma and hepatitis. Allen had not yet arrived on campus. Of particular relevance to the advancement of cardiac surgery science was the fact that Frank Gerbode, M.D., a San Francisco pioneer in heart surgery, elected to stay in San Francisco.

On the particular day of Dong's visit, Roy B. Cohn, M.D. was acting department chairman. Cohn was one of the few established Stanford surgeons who made the move from San Francisco to Palo Alto. Cohn was later to perform the first kidney transplants on the West Coast between identical twins and become the mentor for Samuel Kountz, M.D. Initially Cohn indicated that there were no positions available for Dong. After a bit of conversation, Cohn learned that Cohn and Dong's uncle were poker playing students together at the old Stanford Medical School. Of such trivialities arose Cohn's suggestion to Dong that maybe a young cardiac surgeon named Norman Shumway might be interested in having a research fellow for a while.

Norman Shumway, M.D., Ph.D. was not a man to stand on the formalities either in training or of position. Shumway appeared in an office which was no larger than five feet by 10 with a single window in the far side opening on to the center well of the surgical wing of the medical school. The office was shared with another, and the two desks side by side were standard chrome trimmed tan metal desks.

After the briefest of interviews with Dong, Shumway indicated he would support Dong's application for a NIH postdoctoral fellowship. In the meantime, Shumway asked Dong if he would like to see an animal which had just survived a heart transplant operation.

The medical school building was attached to the Palo Alto-Stanford University Hospital. This hospital was as much an experiment in marrying a university medical staff with a community physician staff as was the medical school's marriage with the scientific university community. Although the hospital was subsequently purchased by Stanford and became the Stanford University Hospital, its schizophrenic birth has lingering effects.

The offices in the School of Medicine for the Department of Surgery were arranged such that they were directly across a six foot hallway from the laboratories. In Shumway's case, his laboratory was just a few doors down the hall. The laboratory was 30 by 30 feet in size. There were freshly constructed operating tables, surgical lights, an electrocardiographic machine, and a bulky heart lung machine using the latest technology: a Kay-Cross rotating disk oxygenator. And there was indeed a frisky dog with a recent surgical scar. Also present was the surgical resident, Richard Lower, M.D., who had operated on this the first animal to receive a heart from another animal in the "orthotopic" position and live. It is fair to say that among the three present that day, Shumway, Lower, and Dong, none realized the long-lasting relationship they all would have with the field of heart transplantation and with each other.

Richard R. Lower, M.D. arrived at Stanford because Lower, like Dong, had strayed off the beaten path for surgical training. Lower was raised in Michigan and went to medical school at Cornell. An interest in the outdoors caused him to choose the University of Washington in the northwest for his surgical residency in 1956. However, during his internship, Lower broached the subject of a shorter training period with the chairman, Dwight Harkins, M.D., because of Lower's initial interest in becoming a general practitioner. It was not to be. Harkins' inflexibility lead Lower to Stanford Lane Hospital in San Francisco. The surgeon in charge of residency training there, Victor Richards, M.D., indicated that he could care less how long it took Lower to achieve the training he wanted.

At that time, Stanford required their surgical residents to spend some time in research. The physical facilities of the Stanford surgical laboratories were relics of a past era even for the 1950s. A single large laboratory was used both for research and for a dog surgery course for fourth-year medical students. The wash basins were made of cement. The plumbing was exposed. There were smaller rooms where experiments were carried out in which, on rainy days, the silence of the dark and gloomy interiors was interrupted by the sound of leaking rainwater being caught in buckets.

Lower circulated among the several surgeons assisting all of them with their research projects and there met Shumway, who turned out to be a kindred spirit.

Norman E. Shumway was born in Kalamazoo, Michigan in 1923 and raised in Jackson, Michigan. His career as an attorney was cut short after just one year of prelaw studies at the University of Michigan by army service in World War 11. Recognizing that the infantry was not particularly attractive with a shooting war going on, he took the medical training opportunity presented by the Army with little vacillation. His premedical schooling was in Texas and his medical school training was at Vanderbilt University in Tennessee from which he graduated in 1949. He began his residency at the University of Minnesota graduate program in surgery.

However, after two years, Shumway was required to return to the service during the Korean conflict due to the schooling he had accepted from the government. After another couple of years, he was back at the University of Minnesota.

Owen Wangensteen, M.D. was Minnesota's famed chairman of surgery. Although Wangensteen was a general surgeon, Minnesota had developed into the central hub for fledgling field of open-heart surgery. C. Walton Lilleihei, M.D. lead the clinical effort using cross-circulation and mechanical heart-lung support and F. John Lewis, M.D. lead the effort in the use of total-body hypothermia.

Wangensteen's surgical trainees formally matriculated in a doctoral program. Shumway's mentor was Lewis, and therefore Shumway's doctoral research was on the effects of hypothermia on the heart. Specifically, Shumway studied the ventricular fibrillation threshold showing that as the temperature fell, less current was needed to cause the heart to fibrillate.

However, after five years of training, Shumway felt the urge to move on without taking the rotation through Dr. Wangensteen's service, which in practical effect meant not taking the traditional chief residency.

Eschewing the academic life temporarily, Shumway initially began a private clinical practice in partnership with an older surgeon in Santa Barbara, California in 1957. By all accounts, it was not a match made in heaven, and Shumway moved again to Northern California.

Shumway's academic choices were between the University of California and Stanford-Lane in San Francisco. But Shumway recognized that UCSF was not available to him when during his interview with the department chief, Dr. Leon Goldman, Dr. Goldman fell asleep. Shumway quietly left to try his luck with Stanford.

The prospects for a young cardiac surgeon breaking in at Stanford-Lane were only minimally brighter than at UCSF, Shumway was offered running the kidney dialysis machine and all the private practice he could hustle. In real terms, the latter meant taking calls for surgeons on vacation. There was little doubt that Dr. Frank Gerbode, Stanford's established heart surgeon, was not offering Shumway any openings at Stanford in heart surgery.

The opportunity for Shumway arose from an unlikely source - Dr. Ann Purdy. Purdy was one of Stanford's pediatric cardiologists and the wife of Dr. Emile Holman, the long-time chief of surgery at Stanford. Purdy was not satisfied in her professional relationships with Gerbode and Dr. Saul Robinson, another pediatric cardiologist, and moved her base of operations to the then Children's Hospital in San Francisco.

Roy Cohn, who had been working with Purdy on non-cardiac congenital defects in children, suggested that he might be the appropriate surgeon to team with Shumway to perform heart surgery at Children's Hospital. To that end, Cohn provided funds to purchase the equipment necessary, got the referrals from Purdy, and prepared a team to perform the surgery. When the program actually began, the line-up shifted when Cohn, perhaps busy with his clinical work, absented himself from the laboratory preparation stage. Shumway who, nominally, was to operate the heart-lung machine started running the operative team.

Shumway teamed with Raymond Stofer, D.V.M. to work out the heart-lung machine and perfusion issues. Stofer, a master sergeant type in personality and appearance, was a veterinarian recruited by Stanford to oversee the operations of the surgical laboratory. Under his bluff exterior, Stofer was a master metal worker and in his private time a fine photographer. Although he had his own research projects, they were set aside when called upon to develop and operate the perfusion system. Under Shumway's direction, Stofer worked out an extraordinarily unadorned and spartan system with a minimum of gauges and monitors to watch, clean, or repair. The perfusion system was in marked contrast to the complex oxygenating system Gerbode's perfusionists and anesthesiologists had constructed and had become use to. This simplicity was to be a trademark of Shumway's conceptual approach to surgical advances.

Lower was by then collaborating with Shumway, and when the time came for the first clinical cases, the group packed the equipment in a moving van and moved lock, stock, and barrel from the Stanford-Lane laboratories to the Children's Hospital operating room. Shumway's and Cohn's first case was an atrial septal defect in a young woman which was corrected under total-body hypothermia. After the surgery, the operating equipment was all packed up and moved back to Stanford-Lane. There were fourteen more cases done at Children's Hospital before the school and Shumway moved to Palo Alto.

Part Two: Keeping It Cool

Shumway and Lower tackled this problem in the laboratory, exploring an idea Shumway derived from his hypothermia experience. It was called "topical hypothermia." The experimental animal's body temperature was reduced using the perfusion equipment to about 32 degrees centigrade, while catheters were sutured around the edge of the opened pericardium which in turn had been sutured to the edges of the sternal wound to form a cradle. Ice cold saline then continuously flowed into the pericardial cradle, circulated around, and was then continuously sucked out. The technique limited further cooling only to the heart. The aorta was then cross-clamped so that no blood was flowing through the coronary arteries. After a period of time, the aorta was undamped, blood flow restored, and the heart defibrillated with an electric shock. After a period of support the animal could maintain its circulation on its own and the heart-lung machine was discontinued.

Successful experiment after experiment were accomplished. The technique was published in "Selective Hypothermia of the Heart in Anoxic Cardiac Arrest," Surgery, Gynecology, and Obstetrics 1959; 109:750 click here for Acrobat(tm) version.

Part Four: Will It Pump?

Part Five: How Well?

Part Six: Suppressing Rejection In The Switched Hearts

Part Seven: Real Patients