In Passing

Palo Alto, Calif.

Norman Shumway; heart surgeon

Norman Shumway, the first surgeon to perform a successful heart transplant operation in the United States, died Friday of lung cancer, a Stanford University spokeswoman said. He was 83.

“He was a miracle worker,” said Susan Craze, who lost three of her five children to heart disease before Shumway’s team was able to save the other two in the mid-1980s. “We wouldn’t have any children if it weren’t for Dr. Shumway.”

Shumway completed the first successful U.S. adult heart transplant in 1968, but he may be best known for continuing with transplant research as many others quit.

During the 1970s, when most recipients died soon after their operations because of organ rejection or infections, many surgeons became discouraged and stopped performing transplants. But Shumway stuck with it and built a large transplant research team at Stanford that found ways to overcome rejection problems.

Shumway developed tests that enabled the use of smaller doses of dangerous rejection drugs and was one of the first transplant surgeons to begin using the safer rejection drug cyclosporine.

Ultimately, he dramatically improved survival rates for transplant recipients.

Annapolis, Md.

Samuel Koster; My Lai defendant

Samuel W. Koster Sr., the general who was the highest-ranking officer charged in the My Lai massacre during the Vietnam War, died of renal failure Jan. 23 at his Annapolis, Md., home. He was 86.

Koster was in command of the Army’s largest and northernmost division, Americal, on March 16, 1968, when troops led by Capt. Ernest Medina and Lt. William Calley killed hundreds of civilians in a South Vietnamese village also known as Pinkville.

Koster was not on the ground at My Lai, but he flew over the village while the soldiers moved in and afterward. He later testified that he believed only about 20 civilians had died, although he also said he was told about “wild shooting” and a confrontation between ground troops and a helicopter pilot, who tried to stop the shooting of civilians.

Koster left Vietnam in June 1968 to become superintendent of the U.S. Military Academy at West Point. In March 1970, Army prosecutors charged Koster and 13 other officers with dereliction of duty and failure to follow orders.

Koster was reassigned to Fort Meade, Md., where he served as a deputy to the officer, who later decided to drop all charges against him because of a lack of evidence and Koster’s record of service.