Transplant "Trials ”Advocated

Press, Volume CVIII, Issue 31579, 17 January 1968, Page 26

Transplant "Trials ”Advocated

(N.Z. Press Association) DUNEDIN, Jan. 16. “We have now reached a point where the only way of finding out whether it is possible to transplant a human heart successfully is by trying it,” a professor of surgery at the University of Otago Medical School, Professor G. J. Fraenkel, said today. “But,” he added, “I think it is quite unjustifiable to do

this wholesale all over the place. “It should be tried in a few highly-specialised units on a strictly experimental basis—provided, of course, that the patients understand the risk they are taking, and that the results are accurately and fully and scientifically analysed. “Only after that has been done can it be known whether it is justifiable to go on with it.” Of the ethics involved, Pro-

fessor Fraenkel said: “I deplore the publicity there has been with all the recent transplantations. “I fail to see how the publicity can do other than distress the patients’ and donors’ relatives and interfere with the dispassionate assessment of the situation by the surgeons and scientists involved. “At the moment, of course, anybody, who volunteers to have a heart transplanted into them is taking an awful chance. “If you have a kidney transplant and it fails you can be maintained on an artificial kidney. “If you have a heart transplant and it fails nothing can be done for you at present.” The question of donors being allowed to die was “an understandable fear In the public mind,” Professor Fraenkel said; but be could not conceive of this happening in any medical centre with which h* was acquainted. In doctor training, wherever he knew it, the prime concern was the welfare of the individual patient. "Nevertheless,” he said, ‘it is a fact that people can be unscrupulous, and there is no doubt , at all that extreme safeguards will have to be taken In any : centre doing this kind of work, not only to make quite sure that such a thing cannot happen, but to

maka it very obvious that such precautions ar* being taken. “As th* lawyers My, not only must justice be done, it must be seen to be done.”