[6] In 1956, he worked alongside future fellow transplantation pioneer Christiaan Barnard,[7] and in the same year was awarded a surgical doctorate.
[1] He spent many years training promising young residents of cardiology and cardiothoracic surgery at Stanford University.
Among his notable trainees is Stanford cardiologist Hannah Valantine, a native of Gambia who was appointed in 2014 as the U.S. National Institutes of Health Chief Officer for Scientific Workforce Diversity.
Following the first heart transplant in 1967 by Barnard in South Africa, the concept of brain death, already described in 1959 by French neurologists, became more widely accepted.
Shumway was the only American surgeon to continue performing the operation after the poor survival outcomes of early transplants.
[10][11][12] In the 1970s he and his team refined the transplant operation, tackling the problems of rejection and the necessity for potentially dangerous drugs to suppress the immune system.