Authors: Mary Roach
A readout from electrodes in the test tube was run through a sensor hooked up to the readout on a lie detector, which measures emotional excitation via heart rate, blood pressure, sweating, etc. (How you measure the vital signs on a slurry of cheek cells is beyond me, but this is the military and they know all manner of top-secret things.) So the volunteer was escorted to a room down the hall from his cheek cells and shown a disturbing videotape of unspecified violent scenes. The cells, it is said, registered a state of extreme agitation while their owner was watching the tape. The experiment was repeated at different distances over the course of two days. Even as far away as fifty miles, the cells felt the man's pain.
I wanted very badly to see the report of this experiment, so I called INSCOM. I was referred to a gentleman in the history section. First the historian said that INSCOM didn't keep records back that far. I didn't need any of the man's cheek cells to know he was lying. This is the U.S.
government. They keep records of everything, in triplicate and from the dawn of time.
The historian explained that what General Stubblebine had been primarily interested in was not whether cells contain some sort of life unit or soul or cellular memory, but the phenomenon of remote viewing, wherein you can sit at your desk and call up images remote from you in time and space, like your missing cufflink or Iraqi ammunition depots or General Manuel Noriega's secret hideaway. (There was actually an Army Remote Viewing Team for a while; the CIA also contracted remote viewers.) When Stubblebine retired from the army he served as chairman of the board at a company called PsiTech, from which you can hire remote viewers to help you with all your remote-locating needs.
Forgive me. I have wandered far afield from my topic. But wherever it is that I am and however I feel about it, I know that all cheek cells belonging to me within fifty miles of here feel the same way.
The modern medical community is on the whole quite unequivocal about the brain being the seat of the soul, the chief commander of life and death. It is similarly unequivocal about the fact that people like H are, despite the hoochy-koochy going on behind their sternums, dead. We now know that the heart keeps beating on its own not because the soul is in there, but because it contains its own bioelectric power source, independent of the brain. As soon as H's heart is installed in someone else's chest and that person's blood begins to run through it, it will start beating anew—with no signals from the recipient's brain.
The legal community took a little longer than the physicians to come around to the concept of brain death. It was 1968 when the
Journal of the
American Medical Association
published a paper by the Ad Hoc Committee of the Harvard Medical School to Examine the Definition of Brain Death advocating that irreversible coma be the new criterion for death, and clearing the ethical footpath for organ transplantation. It wasn't until 1974
that the law began to catch up. What forced the issue was a bizarre murder trial in Oakland, California.
The killer, Andrew Lyons, shot a man in the head in September 1973 and left him brain-dead. When Lyons's attorneys found out that the victim's family had donated his heart for transplantation, they tried to use this in Lyons's defense: If the heart was stil beating at the time of surgery, they maintained, then how could it be that Lyons had killed him the day before? They tried to convince the jury that, technically speaking, Andrew Lyons hadn't murdered the man, the organ recovery surgeon had. According to Stanford University heart transplant pioneer Norman Shumway, who testified in the case, the judge would have none of it. He informed the jury that the accepted criteria for death were those set forth by the Harvard committee, and that that should inform their decision.
(Photographs of the victim's brains "oozing from his skull," to quote the
San Francisco Chronicle
, probably didn't help Lyons's case.) In the end, Lyons was convicted of murder. Based on the outcome of the case, California passed legislation making brain death the legal definition of death. Other states quickly followed suit.
Andrew Lyons's defense attorney wasn't the first person to cry murder when a transplant surgeon removed a heart from a brain-dead patient. In the earliest days of heart transplants, Shumway, the first U.S. surgeon to carry out the procedure, was continually harangued by the coroner in Santa Clara County, where he practiced. The coroner didn't accept the brain-death concept of death and threatened that if Shumway went ahead with his plans to remove a beating heart from a brain-dead person and use it to save another person's life, he would initiate murder charges.
Though the coroner had no legal ground to stand on and Shumway went ahead anyway, the press gave it a vigorous chew. New York heart transplant surgeon Mehmet Oz recalls the Brooklyn district attorney around that time making the same threat. "He said he'd indict and arrest any heart transplant surgeon who went into his borough and harvested an organ."
The worry, explained Oz, was that someday someone who wasn't actually brain-dead was going to have his heart cut out. There exist certain rare medical conditions that can look, to the untrained or negligent eye, a lot like brain death, and the legal types didn't trust the medical types to get it right. To a very, very small degree, they had reason to worry. Take, for example, the condition known as "locked-in state." In one form of the disease, the nerves, from eyeballs to toes, suddenly and rather swiftly drop out of commission, with the result that the body is completely paralyzed, while the mind remains normal. The patient can hear what's being said but has no way of communicating that he's still in there, and that no, it's definitely not okay to give his organs away for transplant. In severe cases, even the muscles that contract to change the size of the pupils no longer function. This is bad news, for a common test of brain death is to shine a light in the patient's eyes to check for the reflexive contraction of the pupils. Typically, victims of locked-in state recover fully, provided no one has mistakenly wheeled them off to the OR to take out their heart.
Like the specter of live burial that plagued the French and German citizenry in the 1800s, the fear of live organ harvesting is almost completely without foundation. A simple EEG will prevent misdiagnosis of the locked-in state and conditions like it.
On a rational level, most people are comfortable with the concept of brain death and organ donation. But on an emotional level, they may have a harder time accepting it, particularly when they are being asked to accept it by a transplant counselor who would like them to okay the removal of a family member's beating heart. Fifty-four percent of families asked refuse consent. "They can't deal with the fear, however irrational, that the true end of their loved one will come when the heart is removed," says Oz. That they, in effect, will have killed him.
Even heart transplant surgeons sometimes have trouble accepting the notion that the heart is nothing more than a pump. When I asked Oz where he thought the soul resided, he said, "I'll confide in you that I don't think it's all in the brain. I have to believe that in many ways the core of our existence is in our heart." Does that mean he thinks the brain-dead patient isn't dead? "There's no question that the heart without a brain is of no value. But life and death is not a binary system." It's a continuum. It makes sense, for many reasons, to draw the legal line at brain death, but that doesn't mean it's really a line. "In between life and death is a state of near-death, or pseudo-life. And most people don't want what's in between."
If the heart of a brain-dead heart donor does contain something loftier than tissue and blood, some vestige of the spirit, then one could imagine that this vestige might travel along with the heart and set up housekeeping in the person who receives it. Oz once got a letter from a transplant patient who, shortly after receiving his new heart, began to experience what he could only imagine was some sort of contact with the consciousness of its previous owner. The patient, Michael "Med-O"
Whitson, gave permission to quote the letter:
I write all this with respect for the
possibility that rather than some kind of
contact with the consciousness of my donor's
heart, these are merely hallucinations from
the medications or my own projections. I know
this is a very slippery slope….
What came to me in the first contact….was the
horror of dying. The utter suddenness, shock,
and surprise of it all….The feeling of being
ripped off and the dread of dying before your
time….This and two other incidents are by far
the most terrifying experiences I have ever
had….
What came to me on the second occasion was my
donor's experience of having his heart being
cut out of his chest and transplanted. There
was a profound sense of violation by a
mysterious, omnipotent outside force….
…The third episode was quite different than
the previous two. This time the consciousness
of my donor's heart was in the present
tense….He was struggling to figure out where
he was, even what he was….It was as if none of
your senses worked….An extremely frightening
awareness of total dislocation….As if you are
reaching with your hands to grasp
something…but every time you reach forward
your fingers end up only clutching thin air.
Of course, one man named Med-O does not a scientific inquiry make. A step in that direction is a study carried out in 1991 by a team of Viennese surgeons and psychiatrists. They interviewed forty-seven heart transplant patients about whether they had noticed any changes in their personality that they thought were due to the influence of the new heart and its former owner. Forty-four of the forty-seven said no, although the authors, in the Viennese psychoanalytic tradition, took pains to point out that many of these people responded to the question with hostility or jokes, which, in Freudian theory, would indicate some level of denial about the issue.
The experiences of the three patients who answered yes were decidedly more prosaic than were Whitson's. The first was a forty-five-year-old man who had received the heart of a seventeen-year-old boy and told the researchers, "I love to put on earphones and play loud music, something I never did before. A different car, a good stereo—those are my dreams now." The other two were less specific. One said simply that the person who had owned his heart had been a calm person and that these feelings of calm had been "passed on" to him; another felt that he was living two people's lives, replying to questions with "we" instead of "I," but offered no details about the newly acquired personality or what sort of music he enjoyed.
For juicy details, we must turn to Paul Pearsall, the author of a book called
The Heart's Code
(and another called
Super Marital Sex
and one called
Superimmunity)
. Pearsall interviewed 140 heart transplant patients and presented quotes from five of them as evidence for the heart's
"cellular memory" and its influence on recipients of donated hearts. There was the woman who got the heart of a gay robber who was shot in the back, and suddenly began dressing in a more feminine manner and getting "shooting pains" in her back. There was another rendition of the middle-aged man with a teenage male heart who now feels compelled to
"crank up the stereo and play loud rock-and-roll music"—which I had quickly come to see as the urban myth of heart transplantation. My out-and-out favorite was the woman who got a prostitute's heart and suddenly began renting X-rated videos, demanding sex with her husband every night, and performing strip teases for him. Of course, if the woman knew that her new heart had come from a prostitute, this might have caused the changes in her behavior. Pearsall doesn't mention whether the woman knew of her donor's occupation (or, for that matter, whether he'd sent her a copy of
Super Marital Sex
before the interview).
Pearsall is not a doctor, or not, at least, one of the medical variety. He is a doctor of the variety that gets a Ph.D. and attaches it to his name on self-help book covers. I found his testimonials iffy as evidence of any sort of
"cellular" memory, based as they are on crude and sometimes absurd stereotypes: that women become prostitutes because they want to have sex all day long, that gay men—gay robbers, no less—like to dress in feminine clothing. But bear in mind that I am, to quote item 13 of Pearsall's Heart Energy Amplitude Test, "cynical and distrusting of others' motives."
Mehmet Oz, the transplant surgeon I spoke with, also got curious about the phenomenon of heart transplant patients' claiming to experience memories belonging to their donors. "There was this one fellow," he told me, "who said, 'I know who gave me this heart.' He gave me a detailed description of a young black woman who died in a car accident. 'I see myself in the mirror with blood on my face and I taste French fries in my mouth. I see that I'm black and I was in this accident.' It spooked me,"
says Oz, "and so I went back and checked. The donor was an elderly white male." Did he have other patients who-claimed to experience their donor's memories or to know something specific about their donor's life?
He did. "They're all wrong."
After I spoke to Oz, I tracked down three more articles on the psychological consequences of having someone else's heart stitched into your chest. Fully half of all transplant patients, I found out, develop postoperative psychological problems of some sort. Rausch and Kneen described a man utterly terrified by the prospect of the transplant surgery, fearing that in giving up his heart he would lose his soul.
Another paper presented the case of a patient who became convinced that he had been given a hen's heart. No mention was made of why he might have come to believe this or whether he had been exposed to the writings of Robert Whytt, which actually might have provided some solace, pointing out, as they do, that a chicken heart can be made to beat on for several hours in the event of decapitation—always a plus.