Yesterday once more for Assam pig-heart transplant ‘pioneer’ Dhani Ram Baruah

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Prabin.Kalita@timesgroup.com

12.01.2022

Guwahati: Dr Dhani Ram Baruah, the maverick surgeon from Assam who was arrested 25 years ago after he claimed to have kept a terminally ill patient alive for a week on a pig’s heart and lungs, can no longer speak coherently because of illness. But he remembers clearly, with a mix of regret and happiness, the controversial jour ney of the “medical breakthrough” that is now the toast of science but no longer belongs to him.

As news arrived from the US about the first-ever full, live pigheart transplant into a human, 72-year-old Baruah could barely suppress a smile at the thought of what might have been, longtime associate Dr Geeta told TOIon Tuesday. “One is unable to understand most of what he is saying,” she said. “But he conveyed to me that he remembers the surgery he perfor med on January1,1997, on Purno Saikia. ”

The patient, a 32-year-old with a ventricular septal defect,

or a hole in the heart, lived on the transplanted pig’s heart and lungs for seven days at Baruah’s hilltop facility in Sonapur on the outskirts of Guwahati before he died of multiple infections.

Baruah, a fellow of the Royal College of Surgeons in the UK, had a heart surgeon from Hong Kong, Dr Jonathan Ho, assist him in the transplant. “We had initiated the pre-surgery preparation like finding blood donors since December 30, 1996. The final preparation was done 48 hours before the surgery,” Dr Geeta said. After the events were reported, the then AGP government in Assam arrested both Baruah and Ho on the charge of violating the Human Organs Transplantation Act that bars xenotransplantation. Both were kept at Guwahati jail for 40 days before being freed on bail. When he returned from jail, Baruah found his clinic, laboratory and pig farm at Dr Dhaniram Heart Institute and Research Centre gutted in a blaze. Dr Geeta said the surgeon had no knowledge of what happened to his case.

His advocate Nilamani Sen Deka, who went on to become agriculture minister in the Tarun Gogoi-led Congress cabinet, said on Tuesday, “Dr Baruah deserves Nobel for his pioneering work on pig-organ transplantation. He was a victim of the then government in the state. ”