Photograph taken during the proceedings of a meeting held on December 28, 1967, at O'Hare Airport, Chicago, Illinois, on the subject of cardiac transplantation.  On December 3, a team of surgeons under Dr. Christian Barnard at Grote Schuur Hospital in Cape Town, South Africa, had transplanted a heart taken from Denise Ann Darvall, 25, into Louis Washkansky, 56.  Shortly thereafter, Dr. Adrian Kantrowitz at Brooklyn's Mamoniades Medical Center attempted unsuccessfully to perform the same operation on a 19-day old baby.   Patient Washkansky was still alive on December 28 when Barnard attended the meeting held at O'Hare.  The meeting had been called by the Director of the National Heart Institute (NHI) to seek opinions from the leading American proponents of cardiac transplantation, nearly all of them grantees of the Institute, as to the probability of further attempts at this procedure and the attendant logistical and scientific problems still to be solved.  The operative technique used by Barnard was one devised by Norman Shumway and the immunosuppressive treatment was that developed by David Hume.
The attendees shown (from left to right) are:  Drs. Keith Reemstma, University of Utah; William P. Longmire, UCLA; James D. Hardy, University of Mississippi; David M. Hume, Medical College of Virginia; Christian Barnard, Grote Schuur; Andrew G. Morrow, Chief, Surgery Branch, NHI; Donald S. Fredrickson, Director, NHI; Theodore Cooper, Associate Director for Artificial Heart-Myocardial Infarction Program, NHI; Michael E. DeBakey, Baylor; C. Walton Lillehei, Cornell; Norman E. Shumway, Stanford; Adrian Kantrowitz, Mamoniades; Paul S. Russell, Massachusetts General; Watts Webb, Southwestern, Dallas.  Missing from the photograph:  John W. Kirklin, University of Alabama; Thomas E. Starzl, University of Colorado; David A. Blemenstock, Mary Imogene Bassett Hospital, Cooperstown; and C. Rollins Hanlon, St. Louis University.  The photograph is a composite of two photographs taken by Dr. Hanlon.