The heart-lung machine is an essential component in open-heart surgery. Blood from the veins is shunted via catheter to the machine, which introduces oxygen into the blood and then pumps the blood back into the patient's arteries. With the machine thus performing all the functions of the heart and lungs, the heart itself can be stopped while surgery is performed. Before the heart-lung machine, heart surgeons operated blindly, either with the heart still pumping, by slowly chilling the patient's body until circulation nearly stopped, or by connecting the patient's circulatory system to a second person's system during the operation. All of these methods were extremely risky.

While the idea of a heart-lung machine had been proposed as long ago as 1812, the device was not developed until American surgeon, John H. Gibbon, Jr. (1903-1974), decided in 1931 to build a heart-lung machine after a young female patient died...