More on Hearts

V. Two Hearts (Reality)
On February 20, London's Great Ormond Street Hospital for Children removed a girl's heart. Today, they announced her full recovery.

Apparently, Hannah Clark had been given a second heart 10 years ago (a "heterotopic transplant") under the care of a British surgeon named Magdi Yacoub who suspected Hannah's original heart, which was inflamed and performing badly ("cardiomyopathy"), might recover if given a chance to rest. (The article does not mention how old Hannah was at the time, but apparently she is still considered a "child" 10 years later, so she must have been quite young.)

Recently, Hannah's body started to reject the anti-rejection drugs, so surgeons removed the donor heart -- and discovered that her original heart had fully recovered.

It seems that "the modern approach to Clark's problem would be to install a temporary mechanical device which could be removed after a few months, but that such a method had not been available 10 years ago."

VI. Two Hearts (Fiction)
As significant medically as Hannah Clark's case may be, it doesn't hold a candle to the fictional character Dr. Who. He has survived apparently hundreds of years with two hearts, all the while gallivanting around the universe across space and time to intervene on the side of Good in the eternal battle of Good vs. Evil. Of course, he has an advantage over Hannah, because his two hearts are not the result of mutation or surgery. Although human in appearance, he is a Time Lord (the last of his race, according to Christopher Eccleston) and thus has a number of unusual qualities, including notably two hearts and the ability to regenerate himself a number of times. His latest incarnation, which I have not seen, is David Tenant, who promises that things will "hot up" between Dr. Who and his assistant Rose (played by Billie Piper). His predecessor, Eccleston, already declared his love for Rose - quite frankly, that was probably quite enough for a children's TV show.

My favorite Dr. Who is still Tom Baker, with his fabulous "keyboard smile" and off-beat sense of humor, and - while we are on the topic - no hint of hanky-panky in the TARDIS. (The TARDIS is a semi-reliable space/time-ship unfortunately stuck in the form of an old British police call box - the name stands for Time And Relative Dimensions In Space.)

I'm not sure what Tom Baker has done since Dr. Who in the 1970s, but it would seem that he is currently Britain's James Earl Jones. As covered in The Scotsman:

Has Dr Who started ringing you up in the middle of the night? He has me too. This site is an ever growing audio extravaganza of what he has been saying to us all. BT has introduced talking text to and from home phones and for the first three months, they'll be spoken by Tom Baker.

For (Parts I-IV.)