The Suicide Heart and Craving Chicken

Are we only our DNA?  Or is there more to us than just blood and guts?  Can the essence of us live beyond our lives and into the horizon of others?

Two recent stories about The Suicide Heart and a Craving for Fried Chicken lead us into the realm of the uncanny. 

There are two, recent, and incredibly eerie stories of transplanted hearts taking on a life of their own in the bodies of other people.

The suicide heart of one man was implanted into another man who then committed suicide 12 years after marrying the donor’s wife:

No foul play was suspected in 69-year-old Sonny Graham’s death at his
Vidalia, Ga., home, investigators said. He was found Tuesday in a
utility building in his backyard with a single shotgun wound to the
throat, said Greg Harvey, a special agent with the Georgia Bureau of
Investigation.

Graham, who was director of the Heritage golf
tournament at Sea Pines from 1979 to 1983, was on the verge of
congestive heart failure in 1995 when he got a call that a heart was
available in Charleston.

That heart was from Terry Cottle, 33, who had shot himself, Berkeley County Coroner Glenn Rhoad said.

Is suicide intellectual or biological?

Can one rogue heart infect another with suicidal tendencies?

Here’s the amazing story of a woman who received the heart of a young man and began to share his personality and food cravings:

Now that I could eat like a normal person, I found, bizarrely, I’d
developed a sudden fondness for certain foods I hadn’t liked before:
Snickers bars, green peppers, Kentucky Fried Chicken takeaway.

As time
went on, a strange question crept into my mind. Although I hadn’t
thought much about my donor, I was acutely aware that I was living with
a man’s heart – and I wondered whether it was conceivable that this
male heart might affect me sexually.

Until the transplant, I had spent most of my adult life either in a relationship with a man or hoping to be in one.

But after the operation, while I still felt attracted to men, I didn’t feel that same need to have a boyfriend.

I was freer and more independent than before – as if I had taken on a more masculine outlook.

My personality was changing, too, and becoming more masculine.

Are our cravings, passions and intentions stored in the muscle memories of our hearts?

Is it possible to reform a murderer by replacing that bad heart with one of a good Samaritan?

Will kind hearts go for a higher price than evil ones?

Will heart DNA be used as gene therapy for future soldiers to encourage them to kill while in service and then, when they return to civilian life, will their hearts be re-adjusted to care and love instead of standing and fighting?