Dr. Christian Barnard, the surgeon who removed the heart from a dead woman and put it in the body of a sick man, is firm in defending the ethics of the historic operation. "The purpose of this heart transplant," he told a news conference Thursday, "was not to do a heart transplant but to cure a sick man. The only way to do it was by the transplant. So I don't see any ethical question. I just tried to cure a sick man." Barnard, 45, a restless man who likes to joke with the press in both English and Afrikaans about the operation, suddenly turned quiet and measured in his comments when asked about criticism from a few surgeons in the United States. Reports reaching here have quoted Dr. Andre Cournard of Columbia University, a Nobel Prize winner, as saying, "Merely demonstrating that it is technically feasible to transplant a heart from one human to another is not in my opinion ethically a reason to proceed." Others have accused Barnard's University of Cape Town medical team of grandstanding for publicity. Barnard said he removed the heart from the body of 25-year-old Denise Ann Darvall only after she was dead by every legal definition of South African law. He said that meant all activity of the brain, lungs and heart had stopped...

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