Bino

Image Credit: “Heart Disease, 1854,” Dario Robleto, 2017

Erik Kennedy (he/him) is the author of the poetry collections Another Beautiful Day Indoors (2022) and There's No Place Like the Internet in Springtime (2018), both with Te Herenga Waka University Press, and he co-edited No Other Place to Stand, a book of climate change poetry from New Zealand and the Pacific (Auckland University Press, 2022.) His poems, stories, and criticism have been published in places like FENCE, The Florida Review, Los Angeles Review of Books, Poetry, Poetry Ireland Review, the TLS, trampset, and Western Humanities Review. Originally from New Jersey, he lives in Ōtautahi Christchurch in Aotearoa New Zealand.

On 23 January 1964, at the University of Mississippi Medical Center in Jackson, Mississippi, Dr James Hardy sutured the heart of a chimpanzee named Bino into the chest of a man named Boyd Rush. Two days previously the sixty-eight-year-old Rush had had a heart attack. The next day his gangrenous lower left leg had to be amputated. He had advanced cardiovascular disease. His heart couldn’t keep him alive, and it was unlikely that anyone else’s heart could either.

Bino was a male chimpanzee, age not specified. He weighed a little over 40 kilograms. He was the larger of two animals purchased by Hardy in late 1963 and kept at the university. Hardy had already performed the world’s first successful human lung transplant, and now he was hoping to be the first to transplant a heart. Ideally a heart from a human! But the chimpanzees were his back-up plan. Bino and his companion were housed in a lab building basement on the campus and were apparently well fed and exercised, as Hardy wanted his potential heart donors to be healthy. Bino’s cardiac output—an important stat in his case—was measured at 4.25 litres per minute. This is about twenty percent less than the average human heart.

Late on the night of the 23rd, Rush’s condition deteriorated. The operation, if there was to be one, couldn’t wait. Hardy wanted to use a human donor, and he thought he had one. Someone had been critically injured in a road accident, and he was brain-dead. However, his heart continued to beat, and the state of Mississippi did not allow organ donation from someone with a heartbeat. So plan B it was. Hardy polled the four members of his surgical team about whether to proceed using the heart of one of the chimpanzees. Three ayes and one abstention. It took about forty-five minutes to implant Bino’s heart into the chest of Boyd Rush.

The language used in the sources to describe what was done to Bino is remarkable in its detachment, sometimes weird in tone or detail. ‘As the patient was rapidly dying, Hardy was stimulated to transplant a chimpanzee heart,’ I read in a surgical journal. The occasional use of the term ‘xenotransplantation’ (transplantation between species) seems calculated to make the procedure sound as unreal as possible. It is common to read that Bino was simply ‘prepared.’ Like a meal, or a will. One source notes that Hardy’s team ‘harvested the heart.’ Another that they ‘procured a heart.’ Another writes that Bino was ‘anesthetized and cooled,’ as if warming him back up after his heart was removed had been an option. Hardy himself wrote: ‘Thoracotomy was quickly performed under sterile conditions and the heart of the primate was exposed.’ The operation failed. Boyd Rush lived for under an hour. He never regained consciousness. His new heart couldn’t pump enough blood.

Is there always a meaningful difference between language crafted to be ‘objective’ and language intended to obscure? I would probably accept ‘euthanised’ as an accurate word, but that apparently is too big an ask. Perhaps I’m being unrealistic in expecting people to write the way I want them to.

Would it make me happy if someone wrote that Bino was ‘murdered’ or ‘put to death’? No, not ‘happy.’ But I want it to cross people’s minds that it’s something you can say. That you can write about science and progress and call a killing a murder. That it’s accurate to say that a creature that would have been alive had its heart not been cut out has been killed rather than prepared. In some contexts we give ourselves permission to say these things, and in others we don’t. But you always have permission. You don’t always have to throw a bucket of paint on a fur coat, but you always can.

Hardy briefly became a pariah after his operation hit the news. Every press association reported that a human heart had been used. Hardy and the University of Mississippi had been deliberately vague about the provenance of the organ that Rush received, simply describing its rough size and approximate suitability. There was a shitstorm when the facts were admitted. Some people were clearly upset primarily because they felt they had been deceived, but others were horrified by the Island of Doctor Moreau ethical nightmare of the situation. (I am actually impressed by how widespread the revulsion was. I think this speaks well of the sixties.) In reflecting on the impact of the surgery, Hardy later wrote that the transplant of Bino’s heart ‘precipitated intense ethical, moral, social, religious, financial, governmental and even legal concerns.’ This seems to surprise him. ‘We had not transplanted merely a human heart,’ he summarised, ‘we had transplanted a subhuman heart.’ Hardy was a man with a gift for making things worse by trying to explain them.

Hardy gave up trying to win the race for the heart, and in South Africa in 1967 Dr Christiaan Barnard won instead. His team used the heart of a dead human, rather than that of a living animal. And, of course, there is no real coda for Bino. No latter-day memorial, yet. Not much writing about him, because everyone is limited by an absence of information. That is the unpalatable reality sometimes when it comes to projects of recovery and memory: there is only so much that can be done. And when there is only so much that can be done, that is exactly how much you have to do.