A boy from Warsaw
Michel Mirowski was born Mordechai Frydman in Warsaw on October 14, 1924, into a Jewish family. When Nazi Germany invaded Poland in the autumn of 1939, his father gave him a new, Polish-sounding name, Mieczysław Mirowski, in the hope of protecting him from antisemitic persecution. Later his French wife, Anna, called him Michel, and that became the name the world knew.
As a teenager he fled east to escape the Nazis and survived the war in the Soviet Union under terrible conditions. By 1944 he was an officer in a Polish regiment and returned to Poland. There he found that Warsaw, including its ghetto, had been destroyed, and that none of his family remained. According to the National Inventors Hall of Fame, he was the only member of his family to survive the Holocaust; his brother Abraham was among those murdered.
From Lyon to Israel
After the war Mirowski enrolled as a medical student at the University of Gdańsk, but within a year he decided he had to leave Poland. He had become a Zionist, and he emigrated to Palestine. No medical school was yet operating there, so in the autumn of 1947 he went to Lyon, France, to study medicine. He arrived speaking poor French and almost no English, and taught himself both languages, listening to lectures in French and reading medical texts in English.
He graduated in 1954 and returned to Israel, to Tel Hashomer Hospital, where he became first assistant to the chief of medicine, Dr. Harry Heller. Deciding to specialize in cardiology, he trained at the Institute of Cardiology in Mexico City and at Johns Hopkins Hospital in Baltimore, where he studied with Helen Taussig, a pioneer of pediatric cardiology. He then became the sole cardiologist, and later chief of cardiology, at Asaf Harofeh Hospital near Tel Aviv.
The death that started it all
In 1966 Harry Heller, his mentor, began to suffer episodes of ventricular tachycardia, a dangerously fast rhythm of the heart’s lower chambers that can degenerate into ventricular fibrillation, in which the heart quivers instead of pumping. Within weeks Heller died suddenly, at dinner with his family. Mirowski kept asking himself what could have saved him.
The answer, he thought, was a defibrillator that lived inside the body and acted on its own. External defibrillators, which deliver an electric shock through paddles on the chest, could restore a normal rhythm, but only if someone was present with the machine within minutes. Mirowski imagined a device that would constantly watch the heart and deliver the shock itself. Experts told him it could not be done: defibrillators of the day weighed 30 to 40 pounds, and the idea of shrinking one to the size of a cigarette packet seemed absurd. He became convinced that only in the United States could he find the money and technical help to try.
Partners in Baltimore
In 1968 Mirowski became the first director of the coronary care unit at Sinai Hospital of Baltimore, a position that gave him half his time for research. Sinai was affiliated with the Johns Hopkins University School of Medicine, so he could combine running a busy coronary unit with laboratory work on his device, and he moved his family, his wife and their three daughters, to Baltimore. There he met Morton Mower, a young cardiologist at the hospital with experience in animal research. In July 1969 the two began working together on an implantable defibrillator, and only a month later they tested a first crude prototype, built from a broken external defibrillator paddle, on a dog. The invention belongs to both men, and the National Inventors Hall of Fame inducted them together. Mower, nine years younger, was a Baltimore native from a Jewish family, the son of a shoe repairman, who had trained at Johns Hopkins and the University of Maryland; he later carried the work forward in industry and lived until 2022.
The road ahead was long. Their first paper was rejected, grants were hard to find, and many cardiologists were openly hostile. In 1972 Bernard Lown, the inventor of the modern external defibrillator, wrote in the journal Circulation that the implanted defibrillator represented an imperfect solution in search of a plausible and practical application. Critics called it a bomb inside the body. A pacemaker company backed the project from 1970 but withdrew after two years, deciding there was no market.
Building the device
In 1972 Mirowski met Stephen Heilman, founder of the small medical device company Medrad, who put his engineers at the team’s disposal. With Heilman, the engineer Alois Langer, who brought expertise in analysing heart signals, and the engineer William Staewen, Mirowski and Mower worked through the hardest problems: building a battery and capacitor small enough to implant, and teaching the device to recognize a deadly rhythm reliably so that it would shock only when needed. By 1975 they had a prototype small enough to be fully implanted in a dog, and a film of it rescuing an animal from induced fibrillation drew wide attention.
On February 4, 1980, at Johns Hopkins Hospital, the surgeon Levi Watkins Jr. implanted the first automatic implantable defibrillator in a human patient. The early device weighed about 225 grams, roughly the size of a deck of cards, required opening the chest, and could only defibrillate. The invention was protected by U.S. Patent 4,202,340 for an implantable heart defibrillator, and the U.S. Food and Drug Administration approved the device in 1985.
Saving hearts around the world
Sudden cardiac death, usually caused by ventricular fibrillation, kills very large numbers of people every year, often without warning. Before the implantable cardioverter-defibrillator, or ICD, survivors of a cardiac arrest and people at high risk had only drugs and surgery to protect them, and neither was reliable. The ICD gave them a guardian inside the chest that watches every heartbeat and, when it detects a lethal rhythm, delivers a shock within seconds.
Large clinical trials later confirmed what Mirowski had argued for years. In the AVID trial of survivors of dangerous arrhythmias, deaths over about eighteen months were 16 percent with an ICD against 24 percent with drugs. In trials such as MADIT and MADIT-II, which tested ICDs in people with heart damage who had not yet had a cardiac arrest, the devices cut the risk of death by roughly 30 to 50 percent, and the SCD-HeFT trial found that treating 14 patients with weakened hearts for about four years saved one life. Devices became far smaller and could be placed through a vein like a pacemaker, without opening the chest; modern models also pace the heart and can often stop a fast rhythm without a shock. Since 1980 the device, much improved and miniaturized, has been implanted in millions of patients, and the National Inventors Hall of Fame credits it with saving hundreds of thousands of lives.
A survivor’s identity
Mirowski’s life was shaped by the destruction of Polish Jewry. He survived the war as a refugee and soldier, lost his family, and chose to build his life in the Jewish state. Recalling his return to Warsaw at the end of the war, he said that none of his family was left and that he could not even find his old home. After all he had seen, he concluded that the Jews had to have a country of their own to survive, and he described Poland as having become a cemetery for him, a place to which he told himself he would never return. Even after he moved to America he remained closely tied to Israel, where he had trained and practised and where he first conceived his invention.
He was a gifted linguist who spoke French, Hebrew, Polish, Russian, Spanish and Yiddish fluently. Lecturing abroad, he usually spoke English but often answered questions in the language of the country he was visiting. He never learned Italian, and he refused to learn German.
Family and final years
Mirowski and his French wife, Anna, had three daughters, each of whom became a doctor. After years of being ridiculed and turned down for funding, the last part of his life brought recognition. Professional societies and medical schools honoured him, and he received more invitations to write and lecture than he could accept, often travelling with his wife or children.
In the mid-1980s he developed multiple myeloma, a cancer of the blood. He insisted on the most intensive treatment available, and when it stopped working a bone marrow transplant was considered, which would have needed a close relative as donor. His only brother had been murdered in the Holocaust. Michel Mirowski died on March 26, 1990, at the age of 65.
Legacy
In 2002 Mirowski and Mower were inducted together into the National Inventors Hall of Fame for the implantable cardioverter-defibrillator. The basic idea they patented, a device that senses a deadly rhythm and corrects it automatically, remains the foundation of every ICD made today.
His story is one of persistence against both history and expert opinion. A teenager who lost his family to the Nazis, a medical student who learned two languages to qualify, and a cardiologist who spent twelve years building a device that leading authorities said was impractical, he left behind an invention that has given millions of people with dangerous heart rhythms the chance of a longer life.
Sources & further reading
Michel Mirowski, Wikipedia · Michel Mirowski, National Inventors Hall of Fame · The implantable cardioverter-defibrillator: From Mirowski to its current use, British Columbia Medical Journal · Morton Mower, Wikipedia · Researched from the sources above and checked against them. Spotted an error? Tell us.
A life 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.