- Person
- Bernard Lown
- Lived
- 1921–2021
- Field
- Cardiology
- From
- Lithuanian-American
The story
Bernard Lown was born in Utena, Lithuania, in 1921 into a Jewish family; one of his grandfathers was a rabbi. The family emigrated to Maine in 1935, when he was fourteen. He studied at the University of Maine and Johns Hopkins, and trained in cardiology in Boston under Samuel A. Levine.
Lown was convinced that sudden cardiac death, when the heart's rhythm collapses into the chaotic quivering called ventricular fibrillation, could be reversed. In the 1950s doctors had begun to shock fibrillating hearts with alternating current taken from the mains supply, but the method had never been properly tested. In 1959 Lown showed that alternating current could damage the heart and could itself kill.
Working at the Harvard School of Public Health with Barouh Berkovits, an engineer at the American Optical Company, Lown set out to find a shock that was both safe and effective. After a year of intensive experiments, in 1961 the team showed that a particular direct-current waveform, later called the Lown waveform, reliably stopped ventricular fibrillation and restored a normal heartbeat without injuring the heart or the surrounding muscle. Lown also found that timing a shock to avoid a brief vulnerable moment in the heartbeat could safely correct other fast, disordered rhythms, a technique he called cardioversion.
In 1962 the Cleveland Clinic surgeon Donald Effler used the direct-current defibrillator in the operating room, and he credited it with making modern heart surgery possible. Lown's work also helped give rise to the coronary care unit, where heart attack patients are monitored around the clock with a defibrillator ready, and in 1964 he introduced the drug lidocaine to control dangerous heart rhythms.
The Lown-Berkovits waveform remained the standard for defibrillation until the late 1980s and 1990s, when improved biphasic waveforms began to replace it. The safe direct-current shock that Lown pioneered remains the basis of modern resuscitation, from hospital crash carts and paramedics' defibrillators to the automated devices now placed in airports, schools and offices, and the defibrillators implanted in patients at high risk.
Why it matters
Defibrillators descended from Lown's direct-current method restart hearts every day in hospitals, ambulances and public places, giving people in cardiac arrest a chance to survive.
About Bernard Lown
Lithuanian-born Boston cardiologist who invented the direct-current defibrillator that restarts failing hearts and co-founded the doctors’ anti-nuclear movement that won the 1985 Nobel Peace Prize.
Sources
- Bernard Lown Wikipedia
- Bernard Lown, UMaine grad and Nobel Peace Prize winner, dies at 99 Bangor Daily News
- Defibrillation Wikipedia
Another act of tikkun olam. This is part of tikkun olam, the Jewish idea of repairing the world, and every one of us can add to it.