Winchell's Heart

Anyone who has watched him manipulate the wisecracking dummy he calls Jerry Mahoney knows that Paul Winchell, 50, is a talented ventriloquist. But few realize that he may be even more gifted off-camera than on. A gadgeteer with a flair for mechanical problem solving, Winchell has contributed to his own profession by developing new techniques for making dummies move and for animating films. Even more remarkable, he has also contributed to medical science. He has designed and patented a mechanical heart and is now participating in the artificial-heart research program at the University of Utah's medical school.

Inventing comes almost naturally to Winchell, a graduate of a New York school of industrial arts. At age 13, he realized that his sinus trouble seemed to ease when he held his nostrils open, so he contrived a V-shaped gadget to do the job. Later he patented a transparent lens cap for cameras (to help the amateur who shoots with a lens cap on) and invented a device made out of plastic ice cube trays, used for transplanting seedlings.

At the age of 35, after returning to school at Columbia University, Winchell began discussing medicine with several doctor friends; he soon was borrowing their medical books and looking over their shoulders in operating rooms. After watching doctors lower a patient's body temperature prior to an operation by placing him in a tub of ice, Winchell invented a refrigerated, rubberized suit to do the job more easily.

But Winchell's most impressive invention is the artificial heart, which was inspired in part by his mother's death of heart complications following a major infection. "I couldn't see any reason against an artificial heart; it doesn't do anything except pump," said Winchell. "If properly conceived and tied into the circulation system I saw no reason why it couldn't be successful."

After patenting his plastic heart pump in 1963, Winchell offered it to the American Medical Association and American Heart Association. Neither was interested at the time because Winchell had not produced a working model. But the University of Utah's Dr. Willem Kolff was. Kolff, who had already invented the first artificial kidney that patients could use, looked over Winchell's design and found it similar to one he had been working on. He invited the entertainer to work and experiment at the medical center (where Winchell also assisted in transplants).

Winchell has been so impressed by Kolff's work that he has turned his patent over to the University of Utah, where Kolff has already kept calves alive for as long as 14 days with artificial hearts of his own design. Winchell's work may help improve upon that record.

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