Clinical lung transplantation has seen an early start within the history of solid organ trans plantation, marked by the 1963 first lung transplant by James D. Hardy. This was prompted by the seemingly easy way of joining the transplanted organ to the recipient by me ans of a few well-defined anastomoses, i.e. bronchus, pulmonary artery and pulmonary vein carry ing left atrial cuff. The following decade thus witnessed a number of such mostly unilateral lung transplants in several centres, i...

Cardiac surgery has developed dramatically since the first open-he art operations were performed in the mid 1950s. Although the improvement of surgical technique, extracorporeal circulation, and postoperative management has contributed to a marked reduction of morbidity and mortality, the development of cardiac surgery to its present state would not have been possible without blood substitution by homologous donor blood. Only 20 years ago, open-heart operations required an average of 8 uni...

After decades of laboratory investigations mechanical circulatory support for the failing heart has entered the clinical arena. Today, a growing number of patients with progressive myocardial failure awaiting cardiac transplantation is successfully bridged to transplantation with ventricular assist devices. The proceedings of the "Mechanical Circulatory Support"-meeting, held in Berlin, October 21-22, 1995, present new aspects of mechanical circulatory support, recent experience with MCS i...

It was the genius of Gordon Murray in Toronto that introduced the use of allografts into cardiac surgery in the 1950s. Soon after this on opposite sides ofthe world, Sir Brian Barratt-Boyes in Auckland, New Zealand, and Mr. Donald Ross in London, undertook to use allografts for the replacement of diseased aortic valves. Since that time the global interest in allografts has been patchy, episodic, and without a con sensus. Nonetheless, for the last 20 years at least three groups in the world...