Professor Barnard Answers Critics

Press, Volume CVIII, Issue 31583, 22 January 1968, Page 11

Professor Barnard Answers Critics

(N ZP A .-Reuter— Copyright) CAPE TOWN, January 21. The South African heart transplant surgeon, Professor Christiaan Barnard, has accused British surgeons who have criticised his operations of being motivated by hatred of his country, according to the “Sunday Express.”

“They hate us so much they just cannot see that any good can come from South Africa,” Professor Barnard is reported to have said in an interview.

“Some British surgeons have said the heart transplant operations were too early, and another that South Africa was prompted by ‘one-upman-ship,’ ” Professor Barnard said. It was significant that virtually all the criticism had come from Britain and practically none from the United States, which was also in the

i forefront of heart surgery and research. “Before our operations in Cape Town the British were bragging that they were on the verge of doing heart transplants themselves,” Professor Barnard is reported as saying. ! “Three months before we did the operation the British i were saying on television and (elsewhere that they were going to do a heart and lung transplant in one go. "There was no talk then about it being too early for heart transplants.” Professor Barnard said that when they performed the world’s first heart transplant operation on Mr Louis Washkansky, it had never occurred

to any of his team that it would cause such a worldwide sensation. “To read other motives into the operation now is wrong and totally unfair," Professor Barnard said. "Every time surgery has taken a risk, medicine has progressed. “The heart is easier to transplant than the kidneys, but the heart is the mystical seat of the passions, and even scientific men are victims of this concept.” i Professor Barnard also has a number of critics in Germany, including Professor Werner Wachsmuth. a leading surgeon and director of the surgical clinic of the University of Wuerzburg, who has expressed concern about the deaths of the heart donors. He also argues that heart and circulatioh have a functional unity and that it is “naive to imagine a young heart can simply be put into an old machine.” A Nobel Prize winner, Dr Werner Forssman, who has denounced the hearttransplant operations as “unethical and medically unsound,” says he feels the intellectual world should make an outcry against them. ■ United Press International reports that Professor Barnard has already chosen his third subject for a transplant. ! the sixth in medical history, and expects to undertake the operation some time in March after his return from a trip abroad.