Richard Lower (medic, 1929)

Richard Rowland Lower (born August 15, 1929 in Detroit , † May 17, 2008 in Twin Bridges , Montana ) was an American heart surgeon who was one of the pioneers of heart transplants .

Life

Lower studied at Amherst College and Cornell University (MD 1955). He was an assistant professor of surgery at Stanford University , where he and Norman Shumway (with whom he was friends) researched heart transplant technology as early as the 1950s (then as a resident). 1959 transplanted a heart in a dog that survived eight days, while before the dogs usually only survived for hours. He went to the Medical College of Virginia in Richmond, Virginia in 1965 , where he became a full professor of surgery in 1967. In 1989 he retired.

He was one of the American surgeons who were on the verge of a heart transplant in the mid-1960s when Christiaan Barnard , who had been studying the techniques with him the year before (1966), in South Africa, where less strict rules for the Transplant existed, got ahead. As Lower later said, this was a shock to him at first, but then he was the only one who saw Barnard at the US surgeon congress, where he presented his transplant and where he was generally cut by the US surgeons at the time. congratulated after his lecture. Lauer himself performed his first human transplant in 1968 on a 54-year-old patient who survived for a week. His next transplant patient, a 43-year-old also in 1968, survived six and a half years and by the time he retired he had performed a total of 393 transplants. This career was interrupted when he was sued in 1968 by the bereaved relatives of a brain-dead organ donor in Virginia, who could not be asked for consent in time. The trial was decided for him in 1972, but it took up much of his time and was seen as a model trial for such cases in the United States. In the 1970s, Shumway was one of the few in the United States who continued to pursue heart transplants, despite negative media coverage, after a series of failures mainly due to rejection reactions, which only improved significantly with the introduction of cyclosporine in the late 1970s.

In the 1990s he had his own ranch with 300 cattle for several years, but then returned to the medical practice and practiced at a hospital for the poor in Richmond.

In 1983 he received the Ernst Jung Prize .

He was married and had five children.

Web links

• Obituary in the Guardian by Donald McRae, July 31, 2008
• Obituary in the Chicago Tribune 2008

Individual evidence

1. ↑ Others were Norman Shumway and Adrian Kantrowitz . In the case of Lower, this failed several times due to incompatibilities between the donor organ and recipient.
2. ^ Obituary for Lower in the Guardian.
3. ^ Obituary in the Chicago Tribune