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Every Second Counts: The Race to Transplant the First Human Heart
The dramatic race to transplant the first human heart unravelled against a backdrop of searing tension, scientific brilliance, ethical controversy and racial strife. In 1967 four surgeons stood on the brink of medical immortality: Christian Barnard in South Africa; Norman Shumway at Stanford; Richard Lower in Virginia; and Adrian Kantrowitz in New York were all ready to proceed with the world's first human heart transplant.
It had been a neck-and-neck race to the finish. The three Americans had worked together as partners or rivals for years on the techniques that would prepare them for the moment they had the right donor and recipient. But they faced the challenge of a late entrant - the furiously ambitious South African, Dr Barnard, who had once worked with Shumway and then been captivated by the sight of Lower transplanting a dog heart in the research laboratory. He took their transplant techniques home to a country in the grip of apartheid; a country the rest of the word perceived as shockingly backwards.
The race culminated in the early hours of 3 December 1967 when, in a cramped operating theatre in a Cape Town hospital, Barnard stared into the empty chest cavity of Louis Washkansky; the world's first recipient of a viable donor heart. After eight years of daringly innovative research, success, when it finally came, generated the same media frenzy that would engulf Neil Armstrong's walk on the moon eighteen months later. Within hours the winning surgeon became a household name around the world. Yet he became a history-maker as much through good luck and a fateful twist of timing as surgical prowess.
Every Second Counts, written by the award-winning author Donald McRae and based on the intimate recollections of the surviving surgeons, retells for the first time the story of that tumultous race and the relationship between the four men who fought it. It is a true account that combines the utterly compelling - and often shocking - details of science with raw human drama as four men strove to conquer the greatest of medical challenges.
It had been a neck-and-neck race to the finish. The three Americans had worked together as partners or rivals for years on the techniques that would prepare them for the moment they had the right donor and recipient. But they faced the challenge of a late entrant - the furiously ambitious South African, Dr Barnard, who had once worked with Shumway and then been captivated by the sight of Lower transplanting a dog heart in the research laboratory. He took their transplant techniques home to a country in the grip of apartheid; a country the rest of the word perceived as shockingly backwards.
The race culminated in the early hours of 3 December 1967 when, in a cramped operating theatre in a Cape Town hospital, Barnard stared into the empty chest cavity of Louis Washkansky; the world's first recipient of a viable donor heart. After eight years of daringly innovative research, success, when it finally came, generated the same media frenzy that would engulf Neil Armstrong's walk on the moon eighteen months later. Within hours the winning surgeon became a household name around the world. Yet he became a history-maker as much through good luck and a fateful twist of timing as surgical prowess.
Every Second Counts, written by the award-winning author Donald McRae and based on the intimate recollections of the surviving surgeons, retells for the first time the story of that tumultous race and the relationship between the four men who fought it. It is a true account that combines the utterly compelling - and often shocking - details of science with raw human drama as four men strove to conquer the greatest of medical challenges.
356 pages, Paperback
First published January 1, 2006
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About the author
Donald McRae
30 books40 followersDonald McRae was born near Johannesburg in South Africa in 1961 and has been based in London since 1984.
He is the award-winning author of six non-fiction books which have featured legendary trial lawyers, heart surgeons and sporting icons. He is the only two-time winner of the UK’s prestigious William Hill Sports Book of the Year – an award won in the past by Nick Hornby’s Fever Pitch and Laura Hillenbrand’s Sea Biscuit. As a journalist he has won the UK’s Sports Feature Writer of The Year – and was runner up in the 2008 UK Sports Writer of the Year – for his work in the Guardian.
Donald lived under apartheid for the first twenty-three years of his life. The impact of that experience has shaped much of his non-fiction writing. At the age of twenty-one he took up a full-time post as a teacher of English literature in Soweto. He worked in the black township for eighteen months until, in August 1984, he was forced to leave the country. He is currently writing a memoir based on these experiences.
He is the award-winning author of six non-fiction books which have featured legendary trial lawyers, heart surgeons and sporting icons. He is the only two-time winner of the UK’s prestigious William Hill Sports Book of the Year – an award won in the past by Nick Hornby’s Fever Pitch and Laura Hillenbrand’s Sea Biscuit. As a journalist he has won the UK’s Sports Feature Writer of The Year – and was runner up in the 2008 UK Sports Writer of the Year – for his work in the Guardian.
Donald lived under apartheid for the first twenty-three years of his life. The impact of that experience has shaped much of his non-fiction writing. At the age of twenty-one he took up a full-time post as a teacher of English literature in Soweto. He worked in the black township for eighteen months until, in August 1984, he was forced to leave the country. He is currently writing a memoir based on these experiences.
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