Procedures like these are possible because medical teams can stop a patient's heart, pump their blood with a machine during surgery, and restart the repaired heart afterward. The development of that process, commonly called heart-lung bypass, is a triumph of science and engineering that involved taking risks in ways that would be unthinkable today. Desperate surgeons took those risks because the stakes were enormous: People, often children born with heart defects, were dying.
Surgeons knew they could save lives, if only they could access the heart's interior. The creation of heart-lung bypass was clearly "one of the major milestones of modern medicine," said Dr. James K.
Kirklin, the former director of cardiothoracic surgery at the University of Alabama at Birmingham, who now leads a company spun off from the school. He co-wrote a 2022 article in the Journal of the American College of Cardiology on how heart-lung bypass was developed. The effort involved "tremendous collaboration" among researchers, he said.
They were driven to work together by "about as pure a motivation as you could possibly have" – the hope of giving children facing certain death the prospect of a full lifespan. "I mean, who would not want to collaborate on this kind of project?" The beginnings The full history of heart-lung bypass dates back to at least the late 1800s, when German scientists learned how to infuse blood with oxygen by passing it through a membrane. The modern story might begin with Dr.
J.
