In the week ahead we'll be focusing on the tenth anniversary of 9/11. So I thought it might be fitting this weekend to re-run my final pre-9/11 column - and my last non-9/11 column for some while, although I didn't know it at the time. This piece is a remembrance of a once famous man (and by the way, the song referenced below can be heard warbled by me and Miss Jessica Martin here). It's anthologized in Mark Steyn From Head To Toe, but originally appeared in The National Post on September 10th 2001:
Dr Christiaan Barnard was nothing if not vain and it must have bothered him, wherever he is now, that his passing drew so little comment. ABC News rated his death below that of the ten-year old Virginia shark victim and barely any more noteworthy than that of Troy Donahue, hormonal heartthrob of A Summer Place, the fevered blockbuster of four decades ago. Fleet Street ran a few half-hearted pieces pointing out what a racist bully the doctor was, yet even they saw his reaction to the end of apartheid (he decided to leave South Africa) as a paradox, an example of how even the most compassionate benefactors to mankind have their dark side.
As with A Summer Place, it's hard from the vantage of 2001 to realize how large Dr Barnard once loomed. His legacy can be found not just in the thousands to whom he gave new life but in the millions more on whom he had the most profound cultural influence. Before the good doctor, the heart was not just an organ, not just a body part, but an intimate essence of our identity:
Heart And Soul
I fell in love with you…
When I give my heart
It will be forever…
Most of us know of at least one example among friends of friends, or friends of friends of friends, where after 60 years of marriage one partner expires and the spouse follows a week later and is said to have died of "a broken heart". Not a broken heart in the Dick Cheney sense, a matter of stents and bypasses, but something more mysterious and fundamental to our sense of ourselves. No-one ever figured the world needed a song called "Kidney And Liver/I fell in love with you…"
Barnard's success was due not only to his first transplant (1967) but also in the way he negotiated a widespread unease about the procedure. The patient's new heart is, after all, someone else's old heart. Dr Juro Wada was not so canny. A year after Barnard, he performed Japan's first heart transplant, but, lacking the South African's PR skills and more fortuitous political climate, Dr Wada found himself investigated for murder over the precise point at which the organ had been removed from its original owner. He was never indicted, but the furore so discredited the entire procedure that it was not until 1999, 31 years later, that anyone got around to performing Japan's second heart transplant.
Barnard's favourite dinner-party anecdote concerned one of his American customers, a wealthy southerner who'd flown to Groote Schuur to await the next car accident and a potential donor. Looking up from his bed, he sternly warned Barnard's colleague, "Sir, I don't want no black heart." The doctor re-told this anecdote for 30 years, the southern drawl growing ever more exaggerated. Barnard was right to find his patient's position absurd: either the heart is just a pulsing mass of ventricles and arteries or it's something more particular. But if you object to a black heart why not to the white heart of a serial killer or a bow-tied twit on the "Antiques Roadshow" or a teenybopper who's nuts for some airbrushed ninny? There are science absolutists and moral absolutists – those who think all abortions are wrong, all embryo stem-cell research is objectionable – but Barnard understood that in between the vast majority is like that southern client, its views on such issues a contradictory mess of prejudice and self-interest and sentimentality which a savvy operator can easily drive a truck through.
Apparently, the next big transplant thing will be heads. The initial beneficiaries would be those paralysed from the neck down, who, despite perfectly healthy heads, often die prematurely because of multiple-organ failure. If one were to transplant their heads on to healthy bodies, they'd still be paralysed, but their life expectancy would be dramatically improved. Christopher Reeve has been in the forefront of demands for stem-cell research because he has pledged – to the irritation of others with his condition – to walk again and is anxious for science to catch up with his dreams. But it's not difficult to imagine him repositioning his ambitions and championing increased funding for head transplants: it is, after all, different only in degree from what many of his fellow thespians – Pamela Anderson, Anna Nicole Smith – have already undergone.
And, once we get used to the idea of head transplants for the paralysed, why not for the rest of us? I've often felt, for example, that my extreme right-wing views would be far more saleable if I had Naomi Klein's body. But how would a Naomi Steyn work in practice? At the Summit of the Americas perimeter fence, would my heart be telling me to join the ski-masked anarchists and start lobbing concrete while my head was tugging me over to the other side to grab the water cannon and start hosing down Maude Barlow?
What, in other words, comprises the essence of me? The Barnard view of man is like the joke about the old rustic and the axe he's had for 70 years. He's replaced the blade five times and the handle six times, but to him it's still the same old axe. In yesterday's Toronto Sun, Peter Worthington quoted his own surgeon, Tirone David: "Basically, the heart is just a pump, and I'm just a plumber." In that case, is the head the house and the body the foundation? Or is the body the house and the head just some semi-finished attic space where you store a lot of old junk you don't really need?
Heart and soul: Man has achieved mastery over the former, so it was inevitable that he would attempt to finish the job. Stem-cell harvesting, cloning, egg sales on the Internet: what are these things for? In that respect, Dr Barnard's life is as instructive as his work: he used his celebrity to live it up, screw broads, get free Italian hand-made suits. He was a hedonist and narcissist, and why wouldn't he be? For if man is now his own god, then one should serve oneself as devoutly as our superstitious fathers served their unseen Lord. So Barnard graduated from heart transplants to lending his name and prestige to a quack anti-aging cream. Which is what it's about, isn't it? Man's victory over death – not in the sense in which our ancestors believed, the certainty of eternal life in the unseen world, but in the here and now. Who knows what the great beyond's like? What are the chicks like? What are the suits like? Better to conquer death here on earth.
We know what stem-cell research isn't for. It isn't so that, say, a mother carrying a foetus in whom birth defects have been detected can be told by her doctor, "Well, with all this new stem-cell research, he'll be able to live a reasonably normal life." No, that baby will still be aborted. But in thrall to Narcissus we'll be able to live forever and clone even more perfect versions of ourselves, because we know now that we are not hearts and souls but cells and genes and DNA – a redefinition of ourselves begun 34 years ago by Christiaan Barnard.
Will it change our essential humanity? Who cares? "This warfare against nature must end once and for all," declared Michael Fox – not the great Canadian actor and stem-cell activist but the Humane Society's Senior Scholar for Bioethics. "We are very clever little simians, aren't we? Manipulating the bases of life and thinking we're little gods." But he wasn't talking about embryonic stem cells or cloning. He was speaking at a rally against genetically-modified foods. If you clone genetically-modified pigs so that their body parts can be harvested for humans – as Edinburgh's PPL Therapeutics successfully did last year – Mr Fox is entirely relaxed. But if you grow a genetically modified zucchini, the stormtroopers of the enviro-left will burn your crops and blow up your factory. We don't know the long-term effects of a genetically-modified cucumber, fret the Foxes of the world. But on the long-term effects of genetically-modified humans they're positively insouciant.
Poor old Mary Shelley got it so wrong. Picture Castle Frankenstein today, the burgomeister and the villagers with the pitchforks and torches marching up the hill as the seven-foot guy with the bolt through the neck staggers back from the kitchen garden with a little light salad for the Baron. "Oh, my God!" they cry. "Look at the size of that tomato!"