DR. JAMES D. HARDY, 84, pioneering surgeon: Hardy, the surgeon who implanted the first animal heart into a human, helping pave the way for heart transplants, has died. He was 84. Doctors at the University of Mississippi Medical Center, where Hardy conducted his groundbreaking transplant research and trained several generations of surgeons, said Hardy had suffered from heart failure in recent years and died of pneumonia late Wednesday at a nursing home in Jackson. As the medical center’s surgery chief, Hardy headed teams that did three pioneering operations: the first human lung transplant in 1963, the first animal-to-human heart transplant in 1964, and a double-lung transplant that left the heart in place in 1987. “He didn’t do these transplants to be the first, and I don’t think I ever heard Dr. Hardy talk about being the first,” said Dr. William W. Turner Jr., chairman of the medical center’s surgery department.
