Edward B. Stinson (born 1938) is an American retired cardiothoracic surgeon living in Los Altos, United States, who assisted Norman Shumway in America's first adult human-to-human heart transplantation on 6 January 1968 at Stanford University.
For over twenty years, Stinson was the principal investigator for the National Institutes of Health programme project in heart transplantation at Stanford.
Edward Stinson was born in 1938 in San Diego, California[1] and graduated from Stanford University School of Medicine,[2] where he also completed his specialty training in cardiovascular surgery.
[8][9] On 6 January 1968, he travelled to El Camino Hospital to bring the donor Virginia White to Stanford with her heart still beating.
[11]Stinson stayed awake for most of the first five nights after surgery, monitoring recipient Kasperak, while the press continued to report on the whole event.
[16] A heart transplant performed in 1970 by Stinson was later reported in the 1995 Guinness book of records when the recipient had survived more than twenty years.
[20] In the week prior to Christmas of 1986 in Fargo, computer software matched a four-month-old infant donor with Stanford's five-month-old Andrew De La Pena, who had a rare heart defect.
Stinson was able to arrange from the Governor of North Dakota, George A. Sinner, an F-4 fighter jet (one of two stationed in the State) after surreptitiously being given his private telephone number.
The total anoxic time of the donor heart (Fargo to Stanford) was just short of eight hours, clearly missing the four-hour window.
Stinson continued as Director of the clinical heart transplant programme at Stanford until he retired and entered active emeritus status in 1998.
[32] By the year 2000, Stinson's directed Stanford's programme, supported by Shumway, had formed the foundations of expertise that led to 300 worldwide centres and 50,000 heart transplant procedures internationally.
The first official meeting and international programme took place on 14 March 1981 in San Francisco, California[33] with Stinson and Hess and chairmen.