The Last Field

For the last 15 years, Dr. John H. Gibbon Jr. has been trying to make a machine which will take over the work of the human heart and lungs during operations. Last week, to speed fulfillment of this surgeons' dream, the National Heart Institute of the U.S. Public Health Service announced that (among more than $8,000,000 in grants) it was allotting $26,827 to Dr. Gibbon and Philadelphia's Jefferson Medical College.

A surgeon and the son of a surgeon, Gibbon believes that there ought to be a way to relieve the heart of work during an operation on it. Not only would such a machine give the surgeon more time; it would also let him lift up the heart and cut into its main vessels, without causing a spurt of blood. This would enable him to see what needed to be done, instead of depending largely on feel. Some of Gibbon's colleagues agree that a mechanical heart would open "the last field of surgery."

Gibbon has already pried open the gate to the last field. By 1939 he had developed a machine which bypassed the heart and lungs of cats for 20 minutes, with no ill effects. When he resumed the work after wartime duty in the South Pacific, Dr. Gibbon won the backing of Thomas J. Watson, president of International Business Machines Corp. With the help of I.B.M. engineers he has improved the machine, made it more nearly automatic.

The apparatus consists of a drum into which a donor's blood is put, to serve as a priming charge. The veins returning blood to the subject's heart are closed by clamps, and the blood from these veins is pumped into the machine. Revolved 50 to 100 times a minute, the blood spreads into a thin film on the sides of the drum. It absorbs oxygen, which is pumped into the drum, and gives off carbon dioxide, which is withdrawn. Then the refreshed blood is pumped back into the body through an artery. The machine is governed at every step by electrical controls.

Last June, Gibbon reported that his artificial heart had taken over the heart and lung functions of dogs for as long as 46 minutes. He will not even guess when the apparatus will be ready to try on humans. The work of the heart can be done, and done well, by the pumping system; but he is not yet satisfied with the way it does the work of the lungs (putting fresh oxygen into the blood). The lungs' myriad air cells have an absorption area of about 600 sq. ft. A machine duplicating so large an area would be unwieldy. Dr. Gibbon must solve this problem before he can close off a human heart and operate on it while the blood flows through a mechanical bypass.

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