evidence: When I did a 100 heart operations in 1989, I knew it was possible to start a revolution in cardiac surgery: Dr Devi Shetty [...] Theatre of life: Dr Devi Shetty When Devi Shetty was just 14 years old, something remarkable happened in the world of medicine. Christiaan Barnard, a South African cardiac surgeon, performed the world’s first human-to-human heart transplant operation, and the patient lived for 18 days. Shetty, who was studying in a school in Mangalore, Karnataka, was so awed by the development that he decided he would become a heart surgeon. That ambition was reinforced by the respect he saw in people’s eyes for doctors in his town. "They looked at doctors as if they were gods," he recalls.