JACKSON, Miss., Feb. 20 — Dr. James D. Hardy, the surgeon who implanted the first animal heart in a human, helping pave the way for human heart transplants, died here on Wednesday. He was 84
JACKSON, Miss., Feb. 20 — Dr. James D. Hardy, the surgeon who implanted the first animal heart in a human, helping pave the way for human heart transplants, died here on Wednesday. He was 84.
Doctors at the University of Mississippi Medical Center, where Dr. Hardy conducted his groundbreaking transplant research and trained several generations of surgeons, said he had suffered from a failing heart in recent years.
As the medical center's chief of surgery, Dr. Hardy headed teams responsible for three pioneering operations: the first human lung transplant in 1963, the first animal-to-human heart transplant in 1964, and a double-lung transplant that left the heart in place, in 1987.
"He didn't do these transplants to be the first, and I don't think I ever heard Dr. Hardy talk about being the first," said Dr. William W. Turner Jr., chairman of the medical center's surgery department. "What he was incredibly proud of was taking techniques that had been developed in the laboratory and extending them to humans."
The 1964 operation, three years before the first human-heart transplant was performed by a South African surgeon, Christiaan Barnard, was the most controversial.
Dr. Hardy had been conducting transplant research in relative obscurity since 1955 and was ready to perform the first transplant of a human heart in 1964. But when the patient, Boyd Rush, 68, was admitted to the medical center on Jan. 23, 1964, no human heart was immediately available, so Dr. Hardy decided to use the heart of a chimpanzee.
The newly transplanted heart beat on its own at first, but it was too small to maintain independent circulation and Mr. Rush died after 90 minutes.
"Dr. Hardy was the pioneer, the original spark that said, `Let's do it,' " said Dr. Wallace Conerly, dean of the medical center's School of Medicine. "He had been doing the research all along, using both human and chimpanzee hearts. He was severely criticized, but through the years he became the hero and famous."
In reflecting on the impact of the surgery, Dr. Hardy once wrote that the heart transplant "precipitated intense ethical, moral, social, religious, financial, governmental and even legal concerns."
"We had not transplanted merely a human heart, we had transplanted a subhuman heart," Dr. Hardy wrote.
Sheep, baboon and chimpanzee hearts were transplanted into at least four adults from 1964 to 1977; all died within three and a half days. In 1984, an infant known as Baby Fae received a baboon heart at Loma Linda University Medical Center in California. She lived for 20 days.
Dr. Hardy was the chairman of the medical center's surgery department from 1955, when the teaching hospital opened, until his retirement in 1987.
He had been a visiting professor in three dozen medical schools in the United States and abroad.
A native of Newala, Ala., Dr. Hardy received his medical degree from the University of Pennsylvania in 1942.
His wife, Louise Scott Sams Hardy, died in 2000. He is survived by four daughters, Dr. Louise Roeska-Hardy, a philosophy professor in 