Exclusive: Maverick India pig-heart doctor has a controversial reputation

It’s been three weeks since an American man diagnosed with terminal heart disease got a second shot at life, thanks to xenotransplantation (the surgical procedure to transfer an animal’s organ into a human body).

David Bennett, 57, is showing signs of recovery at the University of Maryland Medical Center after he got a heart transplant from a genetically modified pig.

The long-term consistency of Bennett’s heartbeat will now determine whether mankind can finally fall back on animals to save people from dying in the face of an acute shortage of organ donors.

But as the picture of a smiling Bartley Griffith, the American doctor who led the surgery team, with Bennett beamed across the world, news websites in India began digging into the archives to introduce an Indian doctor who had performed the same surgery 25 years ago.

It was in 1997 that Dhaniram Baruah had performed the experimental pig-heart surgery on a 33-year-old terminally ill patient in India’s secluded northeast region.

A quarter of a century after transplanting a normal pig heart into a human body with Dr Jonathan Ho Kei-shing, a cardiac surgeon from Hong Kong, at his own heart institute on the outskirts of Guwahati, Assam, Doctor Baruah was finally making global headlines, with even the BBC producing a news clip.

So why did Baruah’s pig-heart surgery fail to earn global recognition 25 years ago?

No protocols followed

The team of doctors in Maryland clocked years of research work on experimental surgery before receiving the emergency authorisation from the FDA to perform the surgery on Bennett.

But Dr Baruah had followed no such protocols before he transplanted a pig’s heart into a human body.

After the patient, Purna Saikia, died following post-surgery complications, it caused a massive uproar in Assam and Baruah’s heart institute was burnt down by a violent mob.

Dr Baruah and Dr Ho Kei-shing even ended up in prison for 40 days before a lower court granted them bail.

The fallout even reportedly led to Ho Kei-shing’s cancellation of medical licence in Hong Kong.

But now Dr Griffith’s success in Maryland has raised question marks over the handling of the situation by the then Assam state government which deemed Baruah’s experimental surgery unethical.

Saigeeta Achrekar, a biochemist from Mumbai who has been working at the Dr Dhaniram Baruah Heart Institute & Research Centre in Sonapur, Assam, for more than 30 years, feels India had missed out on a great opportunity by not backing Baruah’s project.

“If they had allowed Dr Baruah to go ahead with his work, xenotransplantation would have been much easier by now in India,” Achrekar told Khaleej Times over the phone from Assam.

“Who wants the organs? Those who are needy. People die waiting for a donor. So if the authorities had allowed Dr Baruah to continue his research, it would have been much easier for the needy patients.”

But Baruah doesn’t find support from the vast majority of medical professionals in Assam.

Dr Navanil Barua, a renowned Guwahati-based neurosurgeon, was dispassionate in his response to a Khaleej Times query.

“First and foremost, xenotransplantation is not Dr Dhaniram Baruah’s concept, it exists in science. Secondly, to do such a major surgery, you need to have a lot of facilities and extensive pre-surgery work. He did it without even the basics. Even if he had succeeded, the patient would have died of tissue rejection,” the senior doctor said.

“Also none of his work has been published in any peer-reviewed journal. One cannot equate him with the US experiment — much as we would love to.”

Doubts over seven-day claim

Nripendra Nath Bhattacharjee was the jailer in the Guwahati jail where Baruah and Dr Ho Kei-shing were detained for 40 days.

“Both of them used to talk to me in the jail, especially Dr Baruah. I remember one Chinese-American man used to visit them in jail. I don’t know what they talked about. He was probably a doctor as well,” Bhattacharjee recalled while talking to Khaleej Times.

“From my conversations with Baruah, he seemed very confident in the surgery that he had done with Dr Ho Kei-shing and both of them claimed that the patient survived seven days after the surgery.”

But Manoj Goswami, the editor in chief of two of Assam’s biggest media houses, Amar Asom and NK TV, raised questions over the validity of those claims (which were widely reported in media) made by Doctor Baruah’s team.

“You cannot justify what he (Dr Dhaniram Baruah) did. You cannot term it (the pig-heart transplant) as an achievement,” Goswami told Khaleej Times.

“In the US, they had done years of research. It took them more than 10 years to finally do the pig-heart surgery. It was a genetically modified pig heart. And also, they announced it to the world only after the patient survived the first 15 days.

“In Dhaniram Baruah’s case, he claimed the patient died after seven days. But according to the commission set up (by the Assam government) to investigate the Dhaniram issue, the patient did not even survive the first day.”

Unconventional methods

So what inspired Dr Dhaniram Baruah to carry out such a massive surgery all those years ago in Assam?

The man who has that answer is Sunil Dawka, a prominent cardiac surgeon from Assam who got to know Baruah personally after the latter worked for a short while at a Guwahati hospital founded by his father, Doctor Bhabit Dawka.

According to Dawka, the maverick doctor probably got his ‘experimental’ ideas while doing his FRCS (Fellowship of the Royal Colleges of Surgeons) in the 1970s.

“He did his FRCS in the UK. So he probably got a chance to work in experimental surgery in the UK,” Doctor Dawka told Khaleej Times.

The hugely experienced cardiac surgeon then threw light on Doctor Baruah’s unconventional methods.

“Those days, the pig-heart transplant was being planned in the UK. And they (doctors in the UK) were working on genetically modified pigs because they knew that pigs have diseases, animal diseases, viral diseases which can come into humans. So they were working on that modulation, on how to fight the viruses, how to remove them before doing any organ transplant into humans,” he said.

“So knowing that he (Dr Baruah) said he developed his own solution, which he injected and killed the viruses to make the organ safe. But that has not been documented or accepted by any medical groups or societies. This was his own claim!”

Science fiction

In the 1990s, this story relegated the regular incidents of terror attacks from the front pages of Assam newspapers in the conflict-torn state.

Doctor Baruah dominated the news cycle for more than a month, sending shockwaves across a state that was more accustomed to gunshots than to a surgeon’s scalpel.

But he sank into oblivion after the storm had died down.

“After he was released (from jail), he moved on to other fields,” Dawka said, before adding how the eccentric doctor still continued his experimental work.

rituraj@khaleejtimes.com