people who were to become stars in the field of cardiac surgery and cardiac transplantation. Curiously enough, Wangensteen’s own interests lay in the gastrointestinal tract and ulcer disease. He never appeared to have much interest in heart surgery or transplantation. But his laboratory and the milieu of inquiry he fostered were at the heart (or at least the root) of the matter.

Norman Shumway received his medical degree from Vanderbilt University in Tennessee in 1949, then enrolled at the University of Minnesota where he entered the surgical Ph.D. program of Wangensteen, receiving his degree in 1956. Christiaan Barnard, a graduate of the University of Capetown, came to the University of Minnesota in 1956 as a student under Wangensteen, working with C. Walton Lillehei and Richard Varco, two Minnesota surgeons who were developing open-heart surgery. Barnard worked in Minnesota until 1958, when he took a surgical appointment back home at Capetown. Shumway’s studies had to do with the effect of temperature on disturbed rhythms of the heartbeat, a topic of importance in open-heart surgery and later in heart transplantation because of the low temperatures required for preserving the heart while it is disconnected from the circulation. Shumway left Minnesota in 1957, soon moving to Stanford University for a notable career in heart transplantation.

Richard Lower was another Michigan transplanter (Hume was born in Muskegon, Shumway in Kalamazoo, Lower in Detroit). He had attended medical school at Cornell, with a surgical residency at the University of Washington in Seattle, whence, in 1957, he moved to Stanford and worked with Shumway. About 1959 they began to experiment with removing the heart and suturing it back again in the same animal. Richard Lower, working in Shumway’s laboratory and assisted by Eugene Dong, then performed the first successful heart transplantation in a dog, in December 1959.

Shumway carried out his first successful human heart transplantation at Stanford on January 8, 1968. By that time Richard Lower was developing cardiac and thoracic surgery under David Hume at the Medical College of Virginia; Lower could soon demonstrate one of the longest survivors of heart transplantation.

Meanwhile, that other Minnesota graduate student, the South