It was well before dawn last Wednesday when Dr. Jack Copeland, the leading heart surgeon at Tucson's University Medical Center, had to face the grim truth: his patient was dying. Thomas Creighton, a 33-year-old Arizona auto mechanic, had undergone transplant surgery 24 hours earlier to replace a heart , ravaged by two heart attacks and cardiomyopathy, a progressive disease of the heart muscle. Right from the start there were problems with the transplanted organ, and a pacemaker had to be used. Then Creighton's body began rejecting the heart. At 3 a.m. he went into cardiac arrest.
As doctors struggled to keep the dying man alive, Copeland's assistants made desperate calls to organ-procurement agencies, hoping to find another human donor heart for him. None was available. Copeland then made a bold decision. He opted to use a virtually untested artificial heart to sustain Creighton until another human heart could be found--a direct violation of federal rules. There was no time, Copeland later said, to seek permission from the Food and Drug Administration, which regulates the use of medical devices: "If we had asked them to make a decision, the patient would have been dead."
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