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Ann Thorac Surg 2003;76:S2188-S2194
© 2003 The Society of Thoracic Surgeons

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Supplement: Gibbon & His Heart-Lung Machine

John Gibbon and the heart-lung machine: a personal encounter and his import for cardiovascular surgery

^a Chancellor Emeritus, Olga Keith Wiess and Distinguished Service Professor, Michael E. DeBakey Department of Surgery, Director, DeBakey Heart Center, Baylor College of Medicine, Houston, Texas, USA

^* Address reprint requests to Dr DeBakey, Baylor College of Medicine, One Baylor Plaza, 6565 Fannin St, Houston, TX 77030, USA
e-mail: mdebakey@bcm.tmc.edu

Presented at the symposium, "Gibbon & His Heart-Lung Machine: 50 Years & Beyond," Philadelphia, PA, May 2, 2003.

The first 300 words of the full text of this article appear below.

I am privileged to have been invited to participate in this Golden Anniversary of the development and first successful clinical use of the heart-lung machine, and I am especially touched to be able to honor Dr Gibbon's memory. He was not only a friend but also an inspiration to me.

I had the pleasure of meeting Dr Gibbon for the first time in the 1930s at a medical meeting, and he later invited me to his laboratory to discuss the experimental work he was then doing on the heart-lung machine using cats. He noted that one of the mechanical problems he encountered was the pump; he was dissatisfied with the one he was using. He had devised a pump himself and had used the Dale Schuster pump for perfusion, but these were simply not adequate for his purposes. When I was a medical student at Tulane University School of Medicine, I had the privilege of working as a technician in a research laboratory. The faculty member under whom I was working was interested in a pump that he could use to study the pulse wave, and he asked me to find such a pump. As a medical student, I had no knowledge of pumps, but I felt a responsibility to fulfill my assignment. I went to the medical library in search of existing knowledge about pumps, but I felt I needed more information. Then I remembered that one of my freshman classmates in the Tulane College of Arts and Sciences decided to study engineering. We had become good friends during college, and when he went into engineering and I went to medical school, we continued to see each other at lunch or dinner about once every week or two. Shortly after my assignment to find a pump, I met him . . . [Full Text of this Article]

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