Dhaniram Baruah, a cardio-thoracic surgeon from Glasgow, now based in Sonapur near Guwahati, was not surprised by U.S. surgeons taking credit in 2022 for what he had pioneered 25 years ago — transplanting the organs of a pig into a human body.
But their claim of a “first in the world” surgery made him wish India, Assam to be precise, was more appreciative of his medical experiments much ahead of their time.
The ordeal he had gone through after the death of his xenotransplantation patient in 1997 flashed across as doctors at the University of Maryland Medical School in the U.S. made a splash upon transplanting a pig heart into a 57-year-old man on January 7.
Xenotransplantation is the process of grafting or transplanting organs or tissues between members of different species.
“He is hurt but what he did 25 years ago is now past. He is now working on Baruah Genetic Engineering, where a number of diseases can be cured with biomolecules isolated from medicinal plants of India’s Himalayan region, without the need for any surgery or xenotransplantation,” S. A. Achrekar, a senior scientist at Dr. Baruah’s research institute in Sonapur told The Hindu.
The 72-year-old doctor lost his voice after undergoing throat surgery some time ago. He spoke via Dr. Achrekar.
“The U.S. surgeons are first in the way that they used a genetically modified pig. It is not easy for a human body to accept the organs of a pig. Time will tell whether the human body will accept the organ of a genetically-altered pig,” he said.
Experiment and jail
At an international conference in 1995, Dr. Baruah was the first to say that pigs are close to humans in various aspects. He had by then developed an electric motor-driven artificial biological heart made of ox pericardium that was implanted in a pig.
He recalled inventing an anti-hyperacute rejecting therapy for the organs of a donor pig so that the human body could accept them easily. “That means the recipient’s body does not feel the donor organ as a foreign body,” he said.
He did not use any immunosuppression and removed antibodies from the blood of Purno Saikia, a 32-year-old end-stage organ failure patient to be experimented on, for extra protection to the donor organs. “The patient was suffering from ventricular septal defect and only a pig’s organs could save his life,” he said.
Dr. Baruah had carried out 102 animal experiments on xenotransplantation and finally transplanted a pig’s heart, lung and kidneys to the patient on January 1, 1997. Jonathan Ho, a Hong Kong-based doctor had assisted him in the transplantation at his research centre.
But Sakia died a week later, triggering an uproar. The two doctors were arrested on January 10 under the Transplantation of Human Organs Act, 1994, booked for culpable homicide and imprisoned for 40 days. The Assam government formed an inquiry committee that marked pig heart implants as unethical and unlawful.
“The wounds are healed but the scars remain,” Dr. Baruah said. But the fact that the patient survived for seven days implied xenotransplantation could be a reality, he added.
Despite a stroke in 2016, he has been working on the genomic mapping of various disease conditions and has developed the Genovac, a vaccine to give disease-free life to humans.
“I have updated the WHO (World Health Organization), the Prime Minister of India and others but no one has responded. Science indeed has no value in India where pooja (prayer) and politics matter the most,” he said.