Symposium, Patient Reunion Will Help Mark 40 Years of Pioneering Work in Heart Transplantation at Stanford

Business Wire, Oct 15, 2008

STANFORD, Calif. -- The afternoon Elizabeth Craze was born 26 years ago, her parents held their breath.

"She is perfect," the doctor told them.

But within four months, Elizabeth, like the four siblings before her, would be diagnosed with heart failure. Three had already died in infancy. The fourth, her older brother Andrew, would be diagnosed shortly after Elizabeth. It was thought to be a death sentence.

"I thought I would go absolutely insane," said her mother, Susan Craze.

This was still the early days of heart transplantation surgery, especially for children. But there was no other choice for the Craze family, and the only place to go was Stanford.

"When I told my doctor in Cleveland we were considering heart transplantation, I can still picture him, backing up against the wall with just this look of horror on his face," Susan Craze recalled.

Forty years ago in 1968, the late Norman Shumway, MD, and a team of doctors performed the first successful heart transplant in the United States at Stanford Hospital on a 54-year-old steelworker from East Palo Alto amid an uproar of controversy and a media frenzy. Proving the naysayers and skeptics wrong, the landmark operation has since become almost routine, saving thousands of lives around the world.

"We both stood there and stared into this huge empty cavity for a good half a minute," said Edward Stinson, MD, who assisted Shumway in carving out the diseased heart in that first transplant surgery. "It was a fairly awesome sight. 'Do you think this is really legal?' I said."

The goal from the beginning wasn't scientific experimentation but to save lives, said Stinson, professor emeritus of cardiothoracic surgery at the Stanford University School of Medicine. To save lives like those of Elizabeth and her brother Andrew.

"It was in no way simply a stunt," said Stinson. "There was no denying there was controversy about the procedure, but we could foresee what the potential was. The underlying ambition was always to improve the quality of life and to extend life."

Transplant survivors and scientific experts in the field of transplantation will travel to Stanford Oct. 24 for a symposium titled "Looking to the Future: 40 Years of Heart and Lung Transplantation at Stanford University" to commemorate the event and to explore the future science of heart and lung transplantation (see full schedule below).

Among those survivors will be Elizabeth Craze, now 26 years old, an IT employee working for Facebook in Palo Alto who at the age of 2 years and 10 months was one of the youngest successful heart transplant recipients in the world.

"I think I'm more grateful about life than most people," said Craze, dressed in red Keds and a gray "Geeks for Obama" sweatshirt on a break from work. "I get excited about the littlest things."

Craze, who celebrated the 24th anniversary of her heart transplant operation this month, has taken medications all her life, struggled with the drugs' side effects that gave her hairy eyebrows during her teen years, and resulted in a kidney transplant operation 10 years ago. But she looks and feels so healthy that friends are always shocked when they find out she's had a heart transplant.

"You wouldn't know there's a thing wrong with her," said Susan, her mother, who moved the family from Cleveland to the Peninsula to be near Stanford in 1989. Elizabeth's older brother Andrew, 41, had the first heart transplant operation in the family, a year before Elizabeth when he was 16. Today he's a mechanical engineer living in Cleveland.

Because there was no Lucile Packard Children's Hospital at the time, both Andrew and Elizabeth received their new hearts at Stanford Hospital.

"My brother-in-law was the first to tell us about Stanford and how Dr. Shumway had continued the heart transplantation program even though so many medical facilities couldn't do it," Susan Craze said. "Stanford's team was just so on top of everything. It was amazing."

Part of the success of the Stanford and Packard programs continues to be their multidisciplinary team approach to patient care, which includes nurses, social workers and physicians. Social workers and nurses committed themselves to Elizabeth's care after the operation, Susan Craze said. During the month-long recovery period, they worked overtime, took the girl trick-or-treating on the hospital ward and camped out by her bedside.

"We could foresee what the potential was for creating a multidisciplinary team approach to treatment," Stinson said. "The whole idea was to transform what was brand-new technology into routine therapeutics."

Advancements in the years following that first successful operation paved the way for future patients. New developments were made, many emanating from Stanford, in anti-rejection drugs, techniques for predicting organ rejection and ways to care for patients after transplants. New laws would define death based on brain function rather than heart function so that beating hearts could be extracted from brain-dead patients.