He’s Back To The Ot

TWO years after the nightmare, the good doctor is walking f ree again. In windswept, squally Calcutta, Dhani Ram Baruah, out of Assam for the first time in two years, is meeting  diplomats, friends and hacks. He’s telling the story of a near-medieval persecution of a scientist by a brutish state egged on by jealous peers. He’s also hunting for a publisher with a fact - filled, 42-page synopsis of his ordeal, which he wants to fashion into a book. The doctor says he’s tired of telling his story again and again, and yet, untiringly, he’s gleaning through the details of this dark saga like a quintessential scientist. It’s a manic obsession after he has finally seen the light. "I have lived through hell all this while," says the wiry 49-year-old doctor.

Baruah isn’t prone to hyperbole and bluster. How else do you explain the state hounding a distinguished cardiac surgeon— a fellow f rom the Royal College Of Surgeons and Physicians, Glasgow— for performing India’s first xenotransplantation (the use of organs from other animals to replace failing hearts, kidneys or livers in humans) two winters ago? This was when the A G P government in Assam th rew Baruah behind bars with 66 hard core criminal prisoners for 40 days for performing a pig kidney, heart and lung transplant on a 3 2 - year-old patient suffering from a chronic heart problem and end-stage multi-organ failure. The patient died of multiple infections seven days after the operation— the longest period a xenotrans-plantation patient has survived ever. But Baruah, detained a week after the surgery was performed with the consent of the patient’s family and relatives, was arrested by 60 policemen late in the night on charges that he had violated India’s human organ transplantation laws. A hastily-drafted police re p o rt said the surgeon ’s nursing home— a 32-bed, Rs 8-crore - worth open heart surgery centre spread over 50 acres, 23 km from Guwahati, and built in 80 days flat by  Baruah himself out of his own savings— had "neither applied for nor obtained registration under Transplantation of Human Organs Act, 1994". It’s another thing that it wasn’t a human organ transpl-antation anyway— animal organs had been transplanted in a human— and even the existing national law had not been still extended to Assam. "The health minister actually refused to believe that a pig heart transplant was possible," says Baruah .

So, the state typically stripped him of his rights and dignity. For 10 days in January ’97, it made Baruah and two associates— a Hong Kong-based surgeon, an admiring peer who saw the surgery, and an assistant— sleep on the floor with criminals in the filthy Guwahati Central Jail, before giving him a small two-room cottage. Then it let him out on bail, took away his passport, and kept him under virtual house arrest at his clinic for 18 months. Baruah’s tribulations were just beginning: his water and power supply was cut off, his animal farm destroyed, a part of his clinic and research centre was  gutted. With two dedicated  assistants, Baruah lived in a clinic room , living off vegetables grown in his garden, drinking stored rainwater and writing papers on transplants by candlelight at night. Semi-lite-rate, gullible locals in the neighbourhood were also instigated: they th rew stones at the scientist, broke glass panes of the clinic, and on one occasion flung a snake at him as he took a stroll in the comp-ound. "When I used to venture out of my clinic, local people would shout, ‘pagol!, pagol!’ (mad!, mad!)," says Baruah now. "It might have been worse than Galileo’s inquisition."

The wheel has turned full circle ever since. Last June, the Calcutta-based Central Forensic Science Research Laboratory (C F S R L) nailed the clumsy government lie that Baruah might not have transplanted an animal organ: serological and D N A tests revealed that the tissues of the implanted heart— sliced out after a post-mortem of the patient — were that of a pig. Emboldened by this scientific vindication, Baruah has complained to the National Human Rights Commission (N H R C) that he was wrongfully arrested and defamed by the Assam government, and sought damages of $1.3 billion. The N H R C has issued notices to the state government and the police to reply to the charges. Now, the Indian Medical Association (I M A), from whom the N H R C sought an expert opinion on the case, is also saying it was grossly wrong to persecute the doctor. "I feel that Baruah became a victim of regional politics and, probably, professional rivalry also. I feel that...politics and religion should not interf e re in the progress of science...," wrote Prem Agarwal, I MA honorary general secretary in a confidential note to the N H R C.

THAT’S p recisely what Baruah’s fixation with xenotransplantation is all about. Growing up in Naogaon in a farming family, Baruah’s homemaker mother used to keep her son awake by spinning thrilling yarns about surgeons cutting up "bellies of patients, cutting out the infected intestine and replacing it with that of a monkey". She was not quite off the mark: since ’64, seven cardiac surgeons around the world have carried out clinical cardiac xeno-transplantations using chimpanzee, sheep, pig and baboon hearts on patients. None of the patients survived beyond 24 hours. Baruah was just the eighth surgeon on this illustrious list, and his patient survived the longest— seven days. Last year, a study of 160 patients carried out by Imutran Limited, a Cambridge-based subsidiary of drug giant Novartis, found that pig transplants were intrinsically safe. Patients treated with the tissue from pigs had not been infected with the dangerous porcine virus, the study reported. The only problem with such transplants is that patients suffer from an immunity problem — the immune system is suppressed. Baruah claims to have made medical history here: he says he has developed the Antigen Suppressing Agent (A S A), a biological solution, which does not suppress the recipient ’s immune system, but "just blinds it." "With the acute shortage  of human donors, xenotransplantation is the future," he insists. "I can bet on it."

His impeccable credentials help Baruah to make such bets, sometimes considered out-rageous by some stodgy, hidebound, decaying  and mercenary peers. A permanent resi dent of the United Kingdom for the past 24 years, he has worked around the world— Glasgow, Sweden, Abu Dhabi— performing heart surgeries, and setting up heart research clinics. Ten years ago, he set up a heart valve-making facility near Mumbai: today, some 2,000 people around the world are using the patented Baruah heart valve, which is stentless, mimics the natural human heart valve and "lasts for 92 years". He has even invented a totally implantable biological heart. In the mid-’80s, Indira Gandhi and the then Assam chief minister, Hiteswar Saikia, coaxed him into coming to India and setting up an open heart surgery clinic in Assam. The rest is shameful history. "I was politically vic-timised," he says. "But I am not to be cowed down. The people who persecuted me are barbarians. I am not going to leave the bat-tlefield  just because of a few barbarians."

Sure enough, these days, the near bankrupt surgeon— Baruah now survives on handouts from friends and remittances from his teacher-wife and family in Glasgow— is readying to carry out experiments in xenotransplantations out of his Guwahati clinic. Some 400-odd patients had signed on for plain open heart surgeries with his clinic when he was arrested: now he wants to get on with his work. No big deal for a maverick scientist who has rain water  baths, sleeps for three hours, lives with 13 mongrels (" My best friends," he says, "They even respond to me on the phone.") and claims that he suffers from no tension. The lone ranger has now set his sights on a Nobel Prize, no less. "Just wait," says Baruah. "You have to come to me again." Stepping into the sun once again, the spunky doctor, who last met his family three sum-mers ago, is ready to get back to work.