Christiaan (Chris) Barnard was born in 1922 and qualified in medicine at the 
University of Cape Town in 1946. Following surgical training in South Africa and 
the USA, Barnard established a successful open-heart surgery programme at Groote 
Schuur Hospital and the University of Cape Town in 1958. In 1967, he led the 
team that performed the world's first human-to-human heart transplant. The 
article describing this remarkable achievement was published in the South 
African Medical Journal just three weeks after the event and is one of the most 
cited articles in the cardiovascular field. In the lay media as well, this first 
transplant remains the most publicised event in world medical history. Although 
the first heart transplant patient survived only 18 days, four of Groote Schuur 
Hospital's first 10 patients survived for more than one year, two living for 13 
and 23 years, respectively. This relative success amid many failures worldwide 
did much to generate guarded optimism that heart transplantation would 
eventually become a viable therapeutic option. This first heart transplant and 
subsequent ongoing research in cardiac transplantation at the University of Cape 
Town and in a few other dedicated centres over the subsequent 15 years laid the 
foundation for heart transplantation to become a well-established form of 
therapy for end-stage cardiac disease. During this period from 1968 to 1983, 
Chris Barnard and his team continued to make major contributions to organ 
transplantation, notably the development of the heterotopic ( 'piggy-back') 
heart transplants; advancing the concept of brain death, organ donation and 
other related ethical issues; better preservation and protection of the donor 
heart (including hypothermic perfusion storage of the heart; studies on the 
haemodynamic and metabolic effects of brain death; and even early attempts at 
xenotransplantation.