We were sad to learn of the death of Dr Norman E Shumway, the Stanford cardiac surgeon who in 1968 performed the first successful human heart transplant in the United States. He is credited with making the operation a standard procedure.

After the first surge of heart transplants in the late 1960s, the procedure fell into disfavour because most recipients survived only briefly following their surgery as their bodies rejected the new organ. In the UK a moratorium was called on human heart transplants at that time. Surgeons then went back to practising the technique in animals to get it right, before again going to humans. Heart transplants now can extend the lives of patients by as much as 27 years.

Dr Shumway insisted surgeons practice their techniques in animals. “The best arena for the training of good surgeons is the dog laboratory,” he once said. Dr Shumway told a reporter in 2004 that two Nobel laureates steered him to the field of heart transplantation.  One was Dr Peter Medawar, a pioneering British immunologist, and the other was Americans for Medical Progress Director Dr Joseph E Murray, who performed the first human kidney transplant in Boston in 1954.

The Guardian obituary mentions animal research in Dr Shumway’s work.