Adrian Kantrowitz

Adrian Kantrowitz (October 4, 1918 – November 14, 2008) was an American cardiac surgeon whose team performed the world's second heart transplant attempt (after Christiaan Barnard) at Maimonides Medical Center in Brooklyn, New York on December 6, 1967.

The infant lived for only six hours.

At a press conference afterwards, Kantrowitz emphasized that he considered the operation to have been a failure.

Kantrowitz also invented the intra-aortic balloon pump (IABP), a left ventricular assist device (L-VAD), and an early version of the implantable pacemaker.

Adrian Kantrowitz was born in New York City on October 4, 1918.

His mother was a costume designer and his father ran a clinic in the Bronx, and his grandparents were from Vermont.

Adrian told his mother as a three-year-old that he wanted to be a doctor, and as a child built an electrocardiograph from old radio parts, together with his brother Arthur.

He graduated from New York University in 1940, having majored in mathematics.

He attended the Long Island College of Medicine (now SUNY Downstate Medical Center) and was awarded his medical degree in 1943 as part of an effort to accelerate the availability of physicians during World War II.

During an internship at the Jewish Hospital of Brooklyn, he developed an interest in neurosurgery, and had a paper published in 1944, "A Method of Holding Galea Hemostats in Craniotomies", in which he proposed a new type of clamp to be used while performing a craniotomy during brain surgery.

He served for two years as a battalion surgeon in the United States Army Medical Corps and was discharged from the Army in 1946 with the rank of major.

After his military service, he switched to specialize in cardiac surgery due to the paucity of positions in neurosurgery.

In 1947, he was an assistant resident in surgery at Mount Sinai Hospital in Manhattan.

He was on the surgical staff of Montefiore Hospital in the Bronx from 1948 until 1955.

He started at Montefiore as assistant resident in surgery and pathology, and progressed to cardiovascular research fellow before becoming chief resident in surgery.

At the New York Academy of Medicine, on October 16, 1951, he screened the world's first movies taken inside a living heart, showing the sequential opening and closing of the mitral valve inside a beating heart.

Using dogs and other animals as experimental subjects, Kantrowitz developed an artificial left heart, an early version of an oxygen generator for use as a component in a heart-lung machine and a treatment for coronary artery disease in which blood vessels would be rearranged during surgery.

He also developed a device that allowed individuals who were paralyzed to have their bladders empty through a signal sent from a radio-controlled device.

From 1955 to 1970, he held surgical posts at Maimonides Medical Center in Brooklyn.

In February 1958, a heart-lung machine Kantrowitz had developed was used during open heart surgery on a six-year-old boy while the surgeons repaired a one-inch hole between the chambers of the boy's heart that was present since birth.

In an October 1959 lecture at the American College of Surgeons, Kantrowitz and colleague Dr. William M. P. McKinnon reported on a procedure in which a portion of muscle from the diaphragm was used to create a "booster" heart to help pump blood in a dog, taking over as much as 25% of the pumping burden of the natural heart.

The booster heart functions by receiving a signal sent by a radio transmitter triggered by the pulse of the natural heart.

Kantrowitz noted that the procedure was not ready to be performed on humans.

Ruff, a "friendly dog of unknown ancestry" was honored by the New York Academy of Sciences as "research dog of the year" for his unwitting participation in the implantation of a booster heart 18 months earlier in a procedure performed by Kantrowitz.

In the early 1960s, Kantrowitz developed an implantable artificial pacemaker together with General Electric.

Throughout the 1960s, he collaborated with a team that included his brother, engineer Arthur Kantrowitz, on the development of a left ventricular assist device.

The first of these pacemakers was implanted in May 1961.

The device included an external control unit that could adjust the pacing rate from 64 to 120 beats per minute to allow the patient to deal with physical or emotional stress.

Dr. James Hardy had performed the world's first heart transplant attempt and first heart xenograft at the University of Mississippi Medical Center on January 24, 1964.

Since there was no standard of brain death, Hardy had acquired four chimpanzees as potential back-up donors.

A comatose Boyd Rush with a faint pulse had been brought to the hospital several days earlier and when he went into shock and was taken into surgery, Hardy polled the fellow doctors on his team, with three voting yes and one abstaining.

Hardy and his team then proceeded with the transplant using a chimpanzee heart which beat in Rush's chest approximately 60 to 90 minutes (sources vary), and Rush died without regaining consciousness.

The hospital's public relations department put out a guarded statement, with many of the early newspaper articles making the assumption that the donor was a human.

In addition, when Hardy attended the Sixth International Transplantation Conference several weeks later, he was treated with "icy disdain."

Building on his experiments with dogs, he performed the world's second permanent partial mechanical heart implantation in a human on February 4, 1966, which was successful, though the patient died 24 hours after surgery as a result of preexisting liver disease.

His second implant of a partial mechanical heart on a 63-year-old woman, on May 18, 1966, lasted 13 days, until the patient died of a stroke.

During these almost two weeks after the surgery, the patient was improving, and was able to sit up and eat well.

This surgery used a valveless device developed with his brother Arthur in which the natural electrical impulses of the patient's heart controlled the action of the pump.

As part of Kantrowitz's research for this project, he conceived of ABO-incompatible heart transplantation, though it would be three decades before it would be put into practice.

In 1981, Kantrowitz became a founding member of the World Cultural Council.