Going to Pot or to Pluto - 6 August 1999

Imagine it's June in America - the first week in June. Everywhere on campuses in New England valleys, in Western deserts, in mountain cities, it is a day which celebrates an American institution as familiar as Independence Day.

It is commencement - graduation day - for the inmates of universities, backwater colleges and high schools everywhere. A declaration that these multitudes of 17-year-olds and 21-year-olds are about to begin their lives.

Other nations have this ceremony - it's simply New World optimism that calls it commencement. Britons, with their damp island realism, call it speech day.

And here, as there, the speaker is an old - or getting on for old - man or woman who's going to tell the palpitating graduates what lies ahead for them in life.

It's always seemed to me a very odd tradition to expect people who are visibly going downhill to tell us what lies over the next crest. Forty-five years ago, before I was silver haired and stooping, I performed this service before the very comely student body of a famous New England women's college.

A month or so ago I was stopped in the street by an old lady - herself silver haired and not exactly as erect as a grenadier. She paltered over to me.

"I was there," she said, "when you told us all at Smith what lay ahead."

I was appalled.

"And how did it work out?" I asked.

"Hmm ... Comme ci, comme ça," she said, which is probably as good an answer as any.

I swore after that first astonishing experience talking on a great foliage-encircled campus before about 400 girls - as we used to say, young women - and their parents and friends and cousins and aunts, all glaring up at me and seeming to say - "Now you do right by our Nell".

I swore then I would never again take on the pretence of advising young people about anything. And I never did.

Until there came this June when my youngest grandson begged me to do the commencement speech at his graduation from high school.

So there I was in another - in a mountainous New England valley up in green and rolling Vermont - before a hundred or two 17-year-olds and parents and cousins etc. And I must say what I saw this time was a splatter of upturned, very young and mischievous faces all saying - "Okay old geezer tell us how we got to behave - what lies ahead - as if you knew."

I began - "The trouble with young people today is that they spend too little time at their studies and too much time having fun. They no longer respect the old and they have no manners."

A small hurricane of gasps.

"Let me tell you," I went on, "these are not my sentiments. I was quoting an old man who spoke those words a little over 2,400 years ago. His name was Socrates."

Well, after that, it didn't matter what I said. The relief was audible - palpable. The rest was gravy.

I gathered later from a candid parent that what these teenagers expected was the usual pompous windbag deploring the frivolity of their ways and giving them advice on how to reform. Ever since I've made a point of not ever, in front of the young, saying things are going to pot.

But no sooner was I here recalling the old lady who'd heard me warn her generation of things to come 45 years ago when in dropped a friend of the family - my son's age - he looks 45, is crowding 60. He was on his way to Europe.

He's the son of an American citizen, he was born here, went to school, college here, spent all his life here - clearly an American if ever there was one. By some perfectly legal twist of the rules he has two passports. I was shocked. Apparently it's okay.

But worse was to come. He showed me his British passport. The first shock to me, who used to own one, was the imprint in gilt at the top - European Union. But there was the reassuring crest - the lion and the unicorn and the encircling warning "Evil to him who evil thinks" - a weird motto for a passport.

I turned the cover and even more reassuring was the well-remembered superscription - "Her Britannic Majesty's Secretary of State" - I thought of him probably silver haired, wise, majestic on the order of Sir John Gielgud. Well he requested and desired in the name of Her Majesty to allow this character to go wherever he wished without let or hindrance - notice the Elizabethan meaning of let, the opposite of today - to prevent - hence Hamlet's "unhand me gentlemen or I'll make a fool of him that let's me".

The bearer was also to be given all necessary protection and assistance - to this American? Humph. Things have come to something.

I turned to the back inside flap and there was the likeness of this turncoat. And how did it describe him? Well I can only suggest the scope of my horror by saying that quite often listening to an American news announcer talk about somebody in the news and say - "He's a British citizen." I shout back at the tele - "Wrong, he is a subject of Queen Elizabeth II."

Well imagine, on this passport I was looking at, it said - "British Citizen." I read it aloud with a short wince of pain. Said the double-dealing scoundrel, who was present, "that's right - no more. No more! The Queen has no more subjects."

So things are going to pot.

"Well," I said - quoting what an old friend of mine chose to have inscribed on his tombstone - "this is the absolute end."

A man has died, a doctor named Dr Lillehei. If your doctor's never heard of him he ought to be ashamed of himself. Or perhaps not.

Come to think of it Dr Lillehei was so caught in the speciality he pioneered - open heart surgery - that he was quite indifferent to publicity, unlike many of the thousand surgeons who were his students, including for instance Dr Christian Barnard.

First, I think his story is a fascinating one but I ought to tell you too that I feel obliged to pay a small, shall I say, heartfelt tribute to him because if it weren't for Dr Lillehei I should not be here broadcasting to you and for that matter many of my listeners wouldn't be sitting up and paying attention.

C Walton Lillehei was born in Minneapolis 80 years ago, graduated from the University of Minnesota in early 1939 and got his medical degree shortly after the Japanese bombed the harbour out of Pearl Harbour.

He was soon off in Europe serving with the Army Medical Corps as, what used to be called, a battlefront surgeon. And apparently the best work of this youngster was precocious enough to make his name known among veteran army surgeons, the sceptics among whom thought of him as an odd fellow with some rum wild notion of one day correcting serious heart disorders by entering the heart itself - something that had never been done.

Out of the army as a colonel he went, in his middle 20s, back to the University of Minnesota and within four years was a full time surgical instructor and there he faced his first problem. There was no artificial way of doing what only nature had been doing for millennia - namely putting oxygen into the bloodstream and circulating blood throughout the body.

Dr Lillehei first tried something called cross circulation, in which the blood streams of the patient and a healthy donor were linked by tubes. It was daring, it could be perilous to the donor, and Dr Lillehei and Dr Wall produced something better - a heart-lung machine that kept oxygen bubbling through the blood during an operation.

Soon Dr Lillehei turned to a tougher problem. What to do about the potentially fatal arrival of a heart block in which the electrical impulses inside your own body, that regulate the beating of the heart, simply dwindle and fail?

Lillehei hooked wires right into the beating heart and fed it electrical impulses from a device containing a battery. This device, about the size of a pack of - ouch - cigarettes, was worn on the chest under the clothing and was carried in a shoulder holster - like a gangster's handgun.

That was only the first of Dr Lillehei's many innovations including the first transplant of the heart and both lungs to be done in New York. Until last year he was lecturing on open heart surgery around the world.

That device, first worn carried in a holster - the landmark date 1958 - was refined years ago and is now implanted under the skin. It is the size of a wristwatch. It was first and is still known as a pacemaker. I touch it now in gratitude to Dr C Walton Lillehei, 1919-1999.

By the way about what lay ahead for those 17-year-olds in the Vermont valley eight years ago - I certainly didn't guess what lay ahead for my grandson Zeb. Nor did he.

Not a remarkable scholar then, he bloomed very quickly into an engineer. Graduated from the toughest university engineering school in the country. Got one of two places out of 60 applicants to go to the space programme centre at Houston and is now on his way to being an astronaut.

His world is not going to pot. To Pluto maybe but not to pot.

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