yowyow...Vascepa..another tale
I went to Harvard Med School in the mid 60s. My sophomore year my roomate was from Brentwood, Ca. Which is next to Beverly Hills. the summer following he got both of us jobs as tennis instructors at the Beverly Hills Rec. Center...
The dean found out about this and changed my plans to something more medically oriented. Turns out I ended up with the best summer job of all. Just before summer HMS was contacted by Avco Everett Research Labs to ask if they could hire a medical student for the summer to work on the Artificial Heart Project that was being pushed by LBJ.
Avco was straight out of a Crichton novel. They had solved the re-entry [problem (how to get objects shot up in space back down to the earth's surface without burning up). They were working futuristic projects: Magneto Hydrodynamic electricity generation, lasers (very new at the time). zero resistant conductor, and near space weapons (highly classified)..The head of the lab was world famous Arthur Kantrowitz...Whose brother was a Cardiac Surgeon in NY City..Kantrowitz was Jewish..and he was always a little ashamed his mother thought less of him because he wasn't a doctor like his brother..
AVCO had submitted a proposal to evaluate the current status of what then looked at as artificial hearts...So my job was to review all literature on the various devices in the planning and up and to give some input to which if any were promising..At that time there were Left ventricular assist devise, some had been tried..all required major cardiac bypass surgery, none of them successful more than a few days..Avco was working with cardiologists and cardiac surgeons from Mass General Hospital,,At that time the prestigious hospital in the world.
They needed me kind of like this board does as medical translator..But I had some good ideas..After a month of reviewing the literature, I met with Kantrowitz, Robert Jones..A genius in fluid dynamics and applied math (developed the first plane which broke the sound barrier) and Harry Petzchek a practical physicist...All assist devices were similar except for one..The similar ones all required extensive surgery..which required the device to be sutured in line with the central major vessels or the heart...The one that was different was a balloon device that was placed in the aorta like a catheter..This device was described by a Greek (Moulopolus) working at the Cleveland Clinic, The paper was two years old in a biophysics journal..with no update..So I called the Cleveland Clinic..The told me the Greek had gone back to Greece and no one at the CC had any further interest in the device...
So my first question to the fluid dynamics guys was would this device pump blood? The answer was an unqualified yes...So I told Dr. Kantrowitz that Avco should concentrate on the balloon pump, and forget the others..They ask me why..I said because everyone likes to compare the heart to a "car engine"...but that's not a good comparison..The heart is like an airplane engine, because when it stops you are in trouble immediately..I also noted that when someone came down with pneumonia..no suggested an artificial lung..rather they would be put on a respirator in hopes of getting better and not needing an artificial lung. From that point AERL and the Mass General did all the significant work on the balloon pump even though the first patient was done in Brooklyn by Kantrowitz's brother.
The Intra Aortic Balloon Pump is still in wide usage 50 years later...
Is my name associated with it?...Of course not..I am fortunate to be the senior author on one of the earliest papers on the IABP..on ballon size..
Medicine is a hierarchy and as soon as R-I comes in no body will remember what I wrote about this drug in 2011, that I was the first to mention the soothing effects of EPA on DES..or other conditions..Mark my words six months after V revolutionizes medicine there will be clinical professors swearing they knew about it all along were the first to discover its wondrous effects...
":>) JL
