In the News - International

World's First Complete Double Arm Transplant

 karl Merk, who lost his arms in a farming accident in 2002, received the world's first complete double arm translant in Munich, Germany, in July 2008.

The donor was a teenager wh had died in a car crash. A total of 40 surgeons, anaesthesiologists, nurses and other support staff carried out the 15 - hour operation at the Munich University Clinic to graft the donor's arms on to the body of Merk, who lost his own just below the shoulder in a combine harvester accident.

Kolff, "Father of Artificial Organs," dies at 97

 Dr. Willem Johan Kolff, "the father of artificial organs," who invented the kidney dialysis machine ad helped design the first artificail heart to be used in a human, died in February 2009 in the U.S.A of surgeons who made headlines worlwide when they implanted an artificial heart, the Jarvik-7, into seattle dentist Barney Clark at University Hospital in 1982. Clark lived for four months, then died with the heart still fuctioning.