GUWAHATI: Some days ago, researchers from Germany, Sweden and Switzerland reported in the journal Nature that “modifications to a cross-species transplantation approach … for the first time has enabled baboons that received genetically modified pig hearts to survive for more than six months”.Researchers at the Ludwig Maximilian University of Munich, Germany, led by transplantation researcher Bruno Reichart, replaced the hearts of five baboons with those from genetically engineered pigs. With this, human trials for inter-species transplants could finally be on the horizon.At Sonapur, 20 km from Guwahati, Dr Dhani Ram Baruah sits in his office in the eponymous ‘Heart City’, a 50-acre campus he set up decades ago with his life’s savings. A Fellow of the Royal College of Surgeons and Physicians in the UK, Baruah is today mainly confined to the premises, two decades after being arrested for transplanting a pig heart to a human recipient in 1997.Half a world away from Munich, Baruah is not surprised by the findings. “I was the pioneer,” he told TOI. “Whoever transplants a pig heart into a human now, I was the first to do it successfully with seven days’ survival. Xenotransplantation has a bright future if it goes in the right direction.”Way back in 1997, Baruah had transplanted a pig’s heart into a 32-year-old man, Purno Saikia, who had a ventricular septal defect, or hole in the heart. With Baruah was an equally controversial Hong Kong-based cardiac surgeon, Dr Jonathan Ho Kei-Shing. Ho had his own run-in with the Chinese government in 1992, when he fit heart valves made from ox tissue — designed by Baruah — into human patients.Saikia’s surgery, according to Baruah, lasted 15 hours. He died of multiple infections a week later. The survival period determined by the International Society for Heart and Lung Transplantation for a xenotransplantation — the transplantation or infusion of any organ from one species to another — to be considered safe for human trial is 90 days.Before Baruah, few surgeons had managed to xenotransplant organs into humans. The survival rates had always been abysmal and each attempt had stirred a hornet’s nest.It was no different in Assam.Both Baruah and Ho were arrested and charged under section 304 (culpable homicide not amounting to murder) of the Indian Penal Code (IPC) and section 18 of the Transplantation of Human Organs Act, 1994 (removal of human organ without authority). Besides, the Dr Dhaniram Heart Institute and Research Centre was found to have “neither applied for nor obtained registration” as required under the transplant laws.The government alleged that the heart may not have been that of a pig — a claim that was later dismissed by Central Forensic Science Research Laboratory in Kolkata in June 1999. Baruah, now 68 years old, was released on bail after 40 days in jail.He returned to find his clinic and lab gutted, his animal farm destroyed, and his water and power supply cut off. He spent the next 18 months under virtual house arrest. He then survived on rainwater and little food, and depended on the charity of friends and his wife, also a doctor in Glasgow.When the controversy had erupted, Baruah was a heart surgeon of international standing. In the early-1980s, he was asked by then-Prime Minister Indira Gandhi and Assam chief minister Hiteshwar Saikia to set up an openheart surgery clinic in his home state. In 1989, he set up a facility in Mumbai to manufacture the patented Baruah heart valve, which has since been used on patients the world over.After the controversy, public opinion and the media turned against him. Over nearly two years of being confined to the gutted campus, Baruah was subjected to taunts and abuse by residents of the area, who called him insane to his face. But the doctor carried on with his research.In the years since, Baruah has surfaced continually with claims considered bizarre or path-breaking — depending on which side of the debate one is on. In 2008, he claimed to have developed a “genetically engineered” vaccine that would “correct” congenital heart defects. In 2011, he claimed to have found the “cure” for HIV by “stopping the amplification of micro-RNA”. Four years later, he announced he had successfully isolated biological molecules from medicinal plants in the Himalayan region, the Baruah Biological Combat Genes, which he said would act as “biological missiles” to “kill HIV”.So where is Baruah investing his efforts now? “I have gone further ahead. I am making strides in applied human genetic engineering, with which the need for xenotransplantation itself will be reduced,” he said, wading into what could be yet another contentious territory. Meanwhile, he says patients continue to come to him for his “expertise”.