Hearts and heads and everything else

Fifty years ago, Dr Christiaan Barnard, a South African surgeon, lifted a human heart out of the chest of a young bank worker who had died in a car crash and installed it in a 55-year-old grocer who was near death.

The prognosis for Louis Washkansky, the world's first heart transplant recipient? Doctors had no clue. "The longer Washkansky goes on, the better," said a doctor who announced the Dec 3, 1967, feat. "Although that does not mean the heart will not be rejected later. The body could decide in five or 10 years that it doesn't want this heart."

Washkansky's new heart lasted 18 days.