The skill to safely navigate the hazards of power and the powerful

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Medicine

WIKIPEDIA

Dr. Moses Judah Folkman

Click on photo for full PBS NOVA interview

In 1961, while conducting medical research in a U.S. Navy lab, Dr. Judah Folkman stumbled upon a hidden secret about how cancer grows. Before the decade was out, he was forming the theory that would occupy the rest of his professional life. He called that theory angiogenesis, and in it he postulated that tumors could not grow larger than the head of a pin without a blood supply. He also believed that the tumor secreted some mystery factor that stimulated new blood vessels to form, bringing nutrition to the tumor and allowing it to grow.

But Dr. Folkman went even further: He also proposed that if the new blood-vessel growth to the tumor could be blocked, that might offer an entirely new way to treat cancer. After decades of work, Dr. Folkman and his team are now watching as clinical trials begin with two recently discovered angiogenesis inhibitors, endostatin and angiostatin.

WIKIPEDIA link to Dr. Judah Folkman

 
Dr. Michael DeBakey dies at 99

1977 photo with wife, Katrin and Olga Katrina

Dr. Michael DeBakey, the world-famous cardiovascular surgeon who pioneered such now-common procedures as bypass surgery and invented a host of devices to help heart patients, has died. He was 99.

DeBakey died Friday night at The Methodist Hospital in Houston from "natural causes," according to a statement issued early Saturday by Baylor College of Medicine and The Methodist Hospital.

DeBakey counted world leaders among his patients and helped turn Baylor from a provincial school into one of the nation's great medical institutions.

"Dr. DeBakey's reputation brought many people into this institution, and he treated them all: heads of state, entertainers, businessmen and presidents, as well as people with no titles and no means," said Ron Girotto, president of The Methodist Hospital System.  Girotto said the surgeon "has improved the human condition and touched the lives of generations to come."

 
"There is no question that he was one of the pioneers of cardiovascular surgery in the last half of the 20th century," Dr. Denton Cooley, president and surgeon-in-chief at the Texas Heart Institute in Houston and longtime DeBakey rival, said Saturday.

Cooley said one of DeBakey's greatest legacies is "that he influenced so many students to pursue careers in cardiovascular surgery."

While still in medical school in 1932, he invented the roller pump, which became the major component of the heart-lung machine, beginning the era of open-heart surgery. The machine takes over the function of the heart and lungs during surgery.

It was the start of a lifetime of innovation. The surgical procedures that DeBakey developed once were the wonders of the medical world. Today, they are commonplace procedures in most hospitals. He also was a pioneer in the effort to develop artificial hearts and heart pumps to assist patients waiting for transplants, and helped create more than 70 surgical instruments.

On Saturday, former colleagues and other medical professionals gathered at the still-uncompleted DeBakey Library on the Baylor College of Medicine to remember DeBakey as a "medical statesman" and perhaps the most prominent doctor in the world in the second half of the 20th century.

"He took risks that others might not take to advance medicine and to prove the value of the procedures," said Dr. Bobby R. Alford, chancellor of the Baylor College of Medicine. "He had impeccable judgment."

"Millions of people are alive today because of the prior work of Dr. DeBakey for the past 60 years," said Dr. Marc Boom, executive vice president of The Methodist Hospital.