AVCO Everett Research Labs....
I doubt there was any higher concentration of brainpower ever assembled in a couple of large research buildings than AERL in the mid sixties...And I would put them up against the Manhattan Project...
For starters they solved the re-entry (from space) problem...If you can't get something to come down from space without burning up...Then you are never going to get manned flights...AERL..had five or six different divisions...Re-entry, LASERs (back when nobody knew what they were good for), super conductivity, MHD (magneto hydrogen dynamics),fusion, and medical...Medical was initially cardiac assistance devices (artificial hearts)...
I started there the summer of my sophomore year at med school..They were looking for a med student with an engineering background..My first assignment was to research artificial hearts and left ventricular assist devices..They were doing a government funded study on the feasability of artificial hearts...Arthur Kantrowitz was head of the labs. He was jewish and his brother Adrian was a cardiac surgeon in New York...And his mother always was most proud of his brother the doctor...even though Arthur was one of the ten most regarded physicists...
I shared an office with Bob Jones...who was one of the greatest wing theory experts and a self taught mathematician...might have been the smartest guy who ever lived...
I reviewed the literature and quickly decided the intra aortic balloon was the most promising device...Simply because it was much easier to utilise and did not require chest surgery...Kantrowitz put the best minds in the lab on the medical project...It was the top priority in the lab...even though it was a financial loser...Arthur quickly adopted me and treated me like I was his favorite son..I went with him on meetings with Gerry Austin chief of cardiac surgery at Mass General and his protege Mort Buckley...Just the four of us talking in a car...Buckley hated my guts because I was just a med student and had no business being included in tht group. Later he came to my oral interview
at MGH and blocked my appointment as an intern...The surgical residents at MGH had a name for Buckley...Darth Vadar....
":>) JL