The heart transplant is 50 years old. It is developed, especially since the discovery of anti-rejection drugs, it works but the lack of donors is an almost insoluble problem which gives rise to new discoveries, such as that of the artificial heart.
You are over fifty years old, and if I ask you: “what were you doing on December 3, 1967?”, You will need some time to think about it to find such precise memories. It will go much faster if I add that on December 3, 1967, Professor Barnard transplanted his first heart. Because, as with Armstrong’s moon landing one night in July 69, everyone remembers the moment he heard this astonishing news. However, the heart transplant is not a technical exploit more important than that of the liver or the lung, much less publicized, but it marked the spirits by the symbolism of the organ which it concerns. Fifty years after the first attempt – moreover a rather resounding failure -, even if it still fascinates, heart transplantation has become more than a daily exercise in France since 500 are performed per year, and more than 4,000 through the world.
The technique is still that developed by Barnard, or rather by Norman Shumway, an American surgeon who has always criticized his South African student for returning home a little quickly to check the accuracy of his lessons …
But in fifty years, the success of this intervention owes less to the dexterity of the surgeons than to another discovery – much more recent since it is only 38 years old -, ciclosporin, the first anti-rejection drug. Indeed, we all know how our body reacts against a foreign body, for example when we have a thorn under the skin. The area becomes red, hard, and the thorn is quickly surrounded by an inflammatory zone whose role is to reject the intruder. Well, we also react violently against the intrusion of a foreign heart.
Hence the first dramatic failures of transplantation and the current successes due to ciclosporin.
However, due to the lack of donors, research is now focusing on the artificial heart, of which the latest version, which we owe to the French Professor Carpentier, is slow to pass the stage of the first experiments in humans.
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