Norman Shumway

Norman Shumway was an American cardiac surgeon at Stanford University who, working with colleague Randall Griepp, performed the first adult heart transplant in the United States in 1968, the year after Christiaan Barnard had performed the world's first such operation in South Africa. When early heart transplant recipients suffered poor survival due to organ rejection and most American surgeons abandoned the procedure, Shumway continued refining the technique, and his adoption of the immunosuppressant drug cyclosporine substantially improved patient outcomes and helped establish heart transplantation as standard treatment. He served as the 67th president of the American Association for Thoracic Surgery, trained many of the next generation's leading cardiothoracic surgeons, and received the Lister Medal in 1994.