Kantrowitz, Adrian

U.S. heart surgeon and medical investigator Adrian Kantrowitz was born on October 4, 1918 in New York City, to general practitioner Bernard Abraham and his wife Rose. Adrian Kantrowitz was responsible for pioneering developments in circulatory assist devices, artificial organs, medical electronics, heart transplantation, and research motion pictures. His interest in medical research began as a child through kitchen experiments conducted with his older brother Arthur, who eventually became a physicist and cofounder of Avco Research Laboratories. Adrian received his bachelor's degree in mathematics from New York University in 1940 before attending the Long Island College of Medicine, now known as the State University of New York (SUNY) Downstate Medical School. Due to the growing need for doctors during World War II, he underwent an accelerated program and was awarded his medical degree in 1943. From 1948 to 1955, Kantrowitz held various positions at the Montefiore Hospital in the Bronx. Through his experimental work with animals, Kantrowitz began developing an artificial left heart (a device he would continue refining for many years), a rudimentary oxygen generator for a heart-lung device, and a treatment for coronary artery disease that involved surgically rearranging blood vessels. In 1955, Kantrowitz received an appointment to the full-time position of Director of Cardiovascular Surgery at the Maimonides Hospital (later known as Maimonides Medical Center) where he led a research team that devised a series of innovative electronic devices to compensate for various physiological malfunctions.. Kantrowitz was a major contender in the race to perform the world's first total human heart transplant. His team transplanted hearts in 411 dogs over a five year period in preparation for human trials. The surgery required a suitable donor and recipient at the same time, which occurred in late 1967. On December 6, 1967, three days after Christiaan Barnard's historic surgery in South Africa, Adrian Kantrowitz completed the United States' first and the world's second human heart transplant. Ethical questions about the scope of Kantrowitz's research escalated existing tension with the administration at Maimonides Hospital. In 1970, Kantrowitz relocated his entire team of surgeons, researchers, biomedical engineers, and nurses to Sinai Hospital of Detroit, Michigan, where he was now an attending surgeon and Chairman of the Department of Surgery. Kantrowitz shifted his primary focus to partial mechanical devices that assisted rather than replaced the natural heart, considering artificial hearts and cardiac transplants too impractical for the foreseeable future. In 1983, Dr. and Mrs. Kantrowitz cofounded L.VAD Technology, Inc., a Detroit-based research and development company specializing in cardiovascular devices.

From the description of Adrian Kantrowitz papers, 1944-2004. (National Library of Medicine). WorldCat record id: 225377181

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