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The Nasty Side of Organ Transplanting.

Chapter 22

A Short History of Human and Xeno Transplanting

Human Transplant History

1700: Human skin was transplanted to burns, disease and injury victims in India.

1905: Frenchman Alexis Carrel began the modern age of organ transplanting when he developed a method of joining blood vessels.

1905: Human blood was transfused into other humans with bad results because blood types weren’t distinguished.

1905: Dr Eduard Zirm performed the first successful corneal transplant. It restored the sight of a man blinded in an accident and was performed in the part of Czechoslovakia now known as the Czech Republic.

1933: Voronoy, a Russian living in France, performed the first recorded human kidney transplant without the benefit of tissue typing. It failed.^[143]

1954: First successful human kidney transplant.

1958: Dr Raben of the USA produced Human Growth Hormone (HGH) using harvested Pituitary glands from morgue corpses. HGH promotes growth in dwarfs and fertility in women who can't get pregnant. The Australian program began in 1965 and finished in 1985 both here and in most of the world due to infected glands spreading Creutzfeldt-Jakob disease.

1966: First simultaneous pancreas/kidney transplant in United States.

1967: First successful liver transplant by Tom Starzl in Denver, Colorado.

1967: Christiaan Barnard, in South Africa, transplants first human heart. Barnard was a son of a Christian missionary and verged on being a sex maniac. He screwed three separate women in one night, had two women at one time and also did it to Italian actress Gina Lollabrigida. His first wife committed suicide, his second wife was 27 years younger than himself and his third wife 39 years younger and whom he met when she was six. Barnard’s work suffered due to international sanctions against South Africa, his arthritis and his refusal to abandon his country.^[144] Barnard was famous and respected world-wide but not particularly so amongst his medical peers. Some say he was more interested in fame and fortune and cared less for his patients.

1968: First Heart transplant in USA

1972: Jean Borel discovers Cyclosporin, the anti-rejection drug made from a poisonous Norwegian fungus. It was approved for use in 1983 and is still the most popular immunosuppressive drug used in transplantation.

1981: First successful heart-lung transplant in USA

1983: First single lung transplant (Canada)

1986: First successful double lung transplant (Canada)

1988: First combined liver and intestine transplant

1989: First successful liver transplant using a living donor. A portion of a living person’s liver was cut off and transplanted into a relative.

1990: First successful transplant where a portion of a living person’s lung was cut out and put into a relative.

2000: First successful lung transplant using organs harvested from “cardiac dead” donors. Performed in Sweden. Lungs are still removed mostly from “brain dead” donors.

Xeno History

1628: Sheep blood transfused to humans in Padua, Italy.

1682: Bones from dog’s skull transplanted into head of wounded soldier.

1800’s: Sheep blood injected into wayward husbands and troublemakers in England to make them calm, or at least sick. Skin cut from living frogs and put on human burns and ulcers. Size of graft was determined by the wriggling of the frogs trying to escape.

1906: Princteau’s failed attempts to transplant rabbit kidney sections into humans.

1910: Ernst Unger puts monkey kidneys into a human. They failed, as did his transplanting a kidney from a stillborn baby into a Baboon.^[145]

1913: Serge Voronoff transplants chimp thyroid into boy aged 14. Failed.

1914: Sheep’s blood transfused to wounded soldiers.

1914: Bone transplant from animal to wounded soldier in France by Russian surgeon Serge Voronoff.^[146]

1920-1923: Serge Voronoff does a series of testicle transplants from monkeys and chimpanzees to elderly men who reported renewed vigour.^[147] His achievement was celebrated on ashtrays engraved with little jokes about improved performance.

1923: Neuhof transplanted a sheep kidney into a human patient who died nine days later.

1958: First successful heart transplant, from one dog to another, by Norman Shumway in the United States. Shumway was a superior surgeon to Christiann Barnard and had more concern for his human patients. He was capable of beating Barnard to the first human heart transplant but knew that organ rejection would kill the recipient and was reluctant to proceed until that problem was more understood.

1963: Keith Reemtsma of the United States transplanted a chimpanzee kidney into a human patient who lasted 63 days. Another one lived nine months with the kidney operating for six.

1964: Dr James Hardy of Mississippi did the first heart transplant from a chimpanzee into a human. The hospital allowed the consenting relatives to believe the new heart would be from a human. You can imagine the surprise when they discovered their child got a chimp’s heart. The kid died during surgery.^[148]

1965: Tom Starzl, aka Tom FrankenStarzl, did six baboon-to-human kidney transplants. All kidneys survived hyperacute rejection but were destroyed within two months from human immune system attacks. One set of kidneys produced fifty litres of urine in 24 hours, which killed the patient.^[149]

1966 to 1973: Tom Starzl transplanted three livers from chimpanzees to children. All died within fourteen days.

1968: Denton Cooley in Houston, Texas transplanted a sheep’s heart into a human patient. Donald Ross in London, England transplanted a pig’s heart into another human. Both hearts were attacked within minutes by the patient’s immune systems and they died.

1977: Christiaan Barnard transplanted two chimpanzee and baboon hearts to humans as auxiliaries until their own hearts could recover. The chimpanzee heart was rejected after four days. The baboon heart wasn’t big enough to support circulation. Both patients died when their own hearts failed to recover.

1984: Dr Leonard L. Bailey, of Loma Linda Seventh-day Adventist Hospital in California, put a Baboon heart into a baby girl called Fae. The kid lasted twenty days. Dr Bailey said it gave him good practice. The hospital got 75 complaints about cruelty to Fae and 13,000 for the Baboon. Leonard Bailey was advised to wear a bulletproof vest. It was ironical that a church specialising in vegetarianism would be a leader in human and xeno transplanting.

1992: Pig heart to human performed in Sosnowiec, Poland. It failed and the patient died.

1993: Leonard Makowka put a pig liver into a human. It failed.

1992 and 1993: Tom Starzl did two baboon to human liver transplants. Both patients died. One lived seventy days. Protesters picketed his house calling him Tom FrankenStarzl. The name stuck.

1996: Pig heart transplanted into a human in India. Patient died and the surgeon was jailed. When he got out he said he was going to do more.^[150]

Experiments on Animals

After Tom Starlz’ failed xeno transplants public and professional attitudes hardened saying that humans shouldn’t be used for virtual experiments until further progress was made on reducing immune reaction to animal organs. The focus then went onto the performing of transplants between different animal species and, predictably, things got rather nasty for the animals.

Duke University in the USA collaborated with Nextran Incorporated while Cambridge University of the UK joined with Novartis. They performed a series of experiments transplanting pig kidneys to baboons, attempting to stop the hyperacute rejection of organs between species. The animals that received the transplanted organs survived from thirty minutes to 35 days.

Duke University/Nextran also did heterotopic heart transplants from pigs to baboons where the baboon hearts were left pumping but a functioning pig heart was also attached. Survival was from 6 hours to 5 days. The research scientists also did pig to baboon lung transplants with the baboons lasting as little as ten minutes to five hours. The sickening descriptions of these experiments are not worth printing but suffice to say that this is the high moral price we pay for developing transplant expertise.

Using animals for human transplanting has been with us since the 1700’s in England when the bloodstream of a living sheep was attached to a coma patient with liver failure. The sheep’s liver cleansed the man’s blood and he awoke full of vigour, but in what could be described as a strong display of ingratitude he jumped out of bed and killed the sheep.

Christiaan Barnard used the same technique in South Africa when he wheeled a baboon into a hospital ward and attached its blood stream to a liver failure patient, who had fallen into a coma, and was at risk of brain damage from blood toxins. Barnard, perhaps having heard the sheep story, covered the baboon so as not to distress others and sedated both the baboon and the patient to avoid any unpleasant reactions. The animal’s liver cleansed the human’s blood and the man recovered. The baboon suffered little detriment except for temporary jaundice and a bad temper.

As stated elsewhere in this monograph, harvested pig and baboon livers are attached to human blood streams and used for temporary liver cleansing when a patient suffers short-term acute liver failure. The patient’s own liver may recover or at least survive until a transplant liver is available.

Judith Brumm, a theatre nurse and clinical program coordinator at Baylor University Medical Centre in Texas, reports a pig liver used to keep alive a liver-failure patient. The pig was specially raised in a sterile environment. Its liver was surgically removed and placed in a dish next to the patient whose blood was perfused for seven hours over three days. It kept the patient alive until a transplant became available.^[151]

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