An article in Time states: “50 years on, new hearts still don’t come easy.”

Our own Terry Gene Nix, interred in Alva Municipal Cemetery, was the first person in the world to undergo Total Intentional Hemodilution heart surgery, a procedure that led to the open-heart surgeries and organ transplants today.

Hemodilution is a means of reducing the use of bank blood and of avoiding the risks of blood transfusion in patients undergoing major elective surgery.

Connecting to a heart-lung machine during transplants of the heart began in 1967 when Dr. Christiaan Barnard replaced the ailing heart of Loui...