Heart Hacks & Big Ideas

Over the past month, I had the great opportunity to participate in the Stanford Explore series, where I heard lectures from many Stanford leaders in the bioengineering field. The most memorable talk for me highlighted the surprising number of scientific breakthroughs leading us to where we are today in terms of our medical technology. I learned that in the 40s, heart surgery was pretty much impossible. To perform the first open heart surgery, surgeons had to improvise a heart for blood flow by attaching the patient's blood flow to the father’s, like a makeshift artificial heart. Examples of ingenuity like this get me excited and make me wonder how they thought of this creative solution. 

Later on, I learned how even people with no medical background can create life-changing solutions. Pacemakers were once refrigerator-sized machines that left patients with only two choices: live without one or be tethered to it. A Stanford doctor had the idea of enlisting help from a local TV repairman, who was also an electrical engineer, and together they built the first pacemaker small enough to be implanted in a person. The doctor identified a problem that needed fixing, and, by drawing on expertise from other fields of engineering and technology, worked together to solve it.

A similar example is the first successful adult human heart transplant in the United States, performed at Stanford in 1968 by Dr. Norman Shumway. After the news broke, other surgeons attempted the procedure, but many of their patients died from organ rejection. Shumway’s success was built on an interdisciplinary team that included surgical innovators, a pathologist, and experts in immunology who developed ways to detect and manage rejection. This reminds me to be knowledgeable across disciplines and remain open to collaboration, no matter how unconventional it may seem at first.