On Jan. 16, 1964, a team of doctors led by Dr. James D. Hardy, professor of surgery and chair of the department at the University of Mississippi Medical Center, transplanted a chimpanzee heart into chest of retired upolsterer Boyd Rush.  The world’s first heart transplanted into a human beat 90 minutes before it stopped.

After Dr. Christian Barnard performed his heart transplant in 1967, the barriers to human transplantation in the United States were swiftly swept aside, and human-to-human heart transplants followed quickly at Maimonides Hospital in Brooklyn, NY, by Dr. Adrian Kantrowitz and at Stanford by Dr. Norman Shumway.