- Person
- Michel Mirowski
- Lived
- 1924–1990
- Field
- Cardiology
- From
- Polish-born Israeli-American
The story
Michel Mirowski was born Mordechai Frydman in Warsaw in 1924 to a Jewish family. He fled the Nazis as a teenager and was the only member of his family to survive the Holocaust. After the war he studied medicine in Lyon, France, and practised cardiology in Israel.
In 1966 his mentor, Dr. Harry Heller, developed ventricular tachycardia, a dangerously fast heart rhythm, and died within weeks. Mirowski asked what could have saved him and imagined a defibrillator implanted in the body that would watch the heart constantly and deliver a shock by itself when a deadly rhythm began. Experts said it was impossible: defibrillators then weighed 30 to 40 pounds.
In 1968 Mirowski became director of the coronary care unit at Sinai Hospital of Baltimore. In July 1969 he began working with Morton Mower, a young cardiologist there, and a month later they tested a crude prototype on a dog. Their first paper was rejected, funding was scarce, and leading cardiologists were sceptical; in 1972 Bernard Lown called the idea an imperfect solution in search of a practical application. With the engineers of Stephen Heilman’s company Medrad, and with Alois Langer and William Staewen, the team solved the problems of size, power and reliable detection.
On February 4, 1980, the surgeon Levi Watkins Jr. implanted the first automatic implantable defibrillator in a patient at Johns Hopkins Hospital. The U.S. Food and Drug Administration approved it in 1985. Later trials showed that implantable cardioverter-defibrillators, or ICDs, substantially reduced deaths in people who had survived dangerous arrhythmias and in people with weakened hearts. The device, now much smaller and implanted through a vein like a pacemaker, has been placed in millions of patients. Mirowski, who had battled scepticism and lack of funding for more than a decade, died in 1990; in 2002 he and Mower were inducted together into the National Inventors Hall of Fame.
Why it matters
Implantable defibrillators watch the heart of people at risk of sudden cardiac death and shock it back into a normal rhythm within seconds, saving many lives every year.
About Michel Mirowski
Warsaw-born Holocaust survivor and cardiologist who, with Morton Mower, invented the implantable defibrillator, a device that shocks a failing heart back into rhythm and has saved countless lives.
Sources
- Michel Mirowski National Inventors Hall of Fame
- The implantable cardioverter-defibrillator: From Mirowski to its current use British Columbia Medical Journal
- Michel Mirowski Wikipedia
- Morton Mower 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.