TODAY MARKS the 35th anniversary of the world's first heart-transplant operation. Conducted by Professor Christian Barnard at Groote Schuur Hospital in Cape Town, South Africa, the operation confounded critics who had assumed such drastic surgery was impossible and derided the notion.
Decades later, the heart is again a source of controversy which, this time, penetrates to the core of its identity. Is it just a pump - a monotonous, mandatory machine - as orthodox Western medicine tells us? Or, as the Chinese character for heart would have us believe, part of the axis of our whole personality. The pump camp may scoff but, according to proponents of 'cellular memory' (the theory that cells can mysteriously retain information), the heart and other organs are vastly underrated by science. They maintain that a lung does not just facilitate the exchange of gases, a liver amounts to more than a biochemical laboratory and a kidney's prowess extends beyond filtering waste products.
Witness the classic case of New Age modern dancer Claire Sylvia. In 1988, aged 47, Sylvia became the recipient of a heart-and-lung transplant. It saved her life after years of cardiopulmonary disease but it was also the apparent trigger for some extraordinary changes that occurred after her five-and-a-half-hour operation.
For instance, instead of hating both beer and green peppers, she suddenly couldn't resist them - along with fried chicken. Stranger still, she began acting macho; she felt like John Travolta in Saturday Night Fever, and was understandably perplexed by the transformation. So she traced the donor's family, who told her she was behaving just like him: in terms of personality, she had effectively become his double.
A Change Of Heart, her 1997 book that describes her experiences, sparked a sensation, winning her appearances on Oprah and a six-figure sum from Disney for the film rights.
Perhaps a more convincing endorsement for her story comes from a Sydney-based practitioner of traditional Chinese medicine (TCM), Sally Yasukawa. She explains the phenomenon through TCM energy theory, which says the body's health or lack of it stems from its chi (life energy). Any illness is a reflection of the chi state. 'In terms of cellular memory, I believe that when someone receives a transplant, the other person's chi is still connected to it,' she says.