A 594-day experiment ended last month with the death of Philip Blaiberg, the South African dentist in whom Dr. Christiaan Barnard implanted another man’s heart. The normality of his life during the past twenty months shows the experiment’s success; the chronic rejection that caused his death points up its failure.
The problems of immunology that finally stayed success for Dr. Blaiberg have reduced heart transplants from an average of one a day to fewer than one a week while medical scientists study the phenomenon that thwarted three-quarters of all transplanted hearts almost immediately. Physicians who want to make the transplant procedure as safe as it is easy need to do further physiological and psychological research.
One Physician implants new life safely but not necessarily easily; he reclaims it—sometimes physically—for himself and others. But God’s love and the transformation it performs are not experiments. And they do not end.
