P. K. Sen

Prafulla Kumar Sen MD (7 December 1915 – 22 July 1982) was an Indian vascular and cardiothoracic surgeon, who led the world's sixth attempt of human heart transplant and India's first in 1968. It dubbed him the fourth surgeon in the world to carry out this operation.

Sen was active in establishing postgraduate programmes in surgical training and one of the early surgeons to perform aortic surgery in India in the 1950s. After being the first in India to perform a closed mitral valvotomy in 1952, within a year he repaired a coarctation of the aorta and by 1956 he had successfully attempted the first direct vision closure of an atrial septal defect. In the 1950s he turned his attention from aortic surgery to open heart surgery following numerous experiments on dogs. He subsequently led teams that performed two heart transplants in Bombay in 1968. Both recipients died on the day of their operation.

Sen was, in addition, a poet and painter. His paintings were displayed once in the United States, and twice in India.

Early life and education Prafulla Kumar Sen, popularly known as P. K. Sen, was born on 7 December 1915 in Calcutta, British India. He had one sister and his father was a civil servant.

He began his early education at a public school in Jamtada, Bihar,

In 1952, following the adaptation of American techniques and after 25 dog experiments, he successfully performed the first intra-cardiac procedure in India by pushing his finger through a rheumatic mitral valve (closed mitral valvotomy) via a cut made in the right atrium of a beating heart. Around the same time, he initiated other vascular repair procedures on the Aorta for the surgical treatment of Aortitis and Aortic aneurysms. In 1965, three out of five dogs who underwent cardiopulmonary transplants were able to breathe after surgery without artificial ventilation. All the dogs had survivals from 5 to 12 hours.

James Hardy, who had previously supervised Sen on his first fellowship at Pennsylvania in 1950, had by 1964 transplanted a chimpanzee heart into a human. Two years later, Hardy visited Bombay and spoke at G.S. Medical College about transplants. The recipient was a male farmer with severe progressive cardiomyopathy who had been admitted to hospital in the previous six months. It took one month from the decision to transplant to find a donor. With less media coverage than numerous other early heart transplants, Sen's heart transplant in February 1968, was before any in Europe, Canada, Australia, Japan or the Soviet Union.

Sen believed India had a vast potential as a transplant centre with a wealth of donor organs resulting from accidents on its disordered roads and railways. KEM did not carry out any further heart transplants until 2015.

1970s Sen's contributions to the procedure of myocardial acupuncture in ischaemic heart disease were followed by developments in aortic arch replacement. His students included Sharad Panday, M. S. Valiathan and S. I. Padmavati and he maintained contact with heart surgeons outside India such as William Bigelow, Denton Cooley, Donald Ross, Norman Shumway and Demikhov.

Calcutta Hospital and Research Centre From 1977, Sen practiced as a consultant cardiovascular and thoracic surgeon at Calcutta Hospital and Research Centre, where he remained until his death in 1982.

Selected publications

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