Hi, it's Alice. 50, 60 years ago, if you were diagnosed with kidney disease or heart disease or liver disease, it was time to trim down your bucket list and update your will. Bypass surgery, not a thing. Dialysis, not a thing. Organ transplantation also not a thing. Not yet. a lot of people in medicine thought these procedures were

pipe dreams but they were in the pipeline thanks to a number of visionary surgeons

and scientists.

Transplantation was a field that was thought to be a

jewels vern type of figment of the imagination.

So I went into that field. Well you got to understand that when I started

there wasn't anything in, there was no cardiovascular surgery. In other words, I, along with many others,

began the development of cardiovascular surgery.

We were ready and poised to do it,

and we did the first successful transplant in the United States.

Same thing about the artificial heart.

The opportunity arose to do it and I went ahead and did it and revealed that people could live not only with a heart

transplant but also with an artificial heart.

We put the patient asleep and we would open the chest, split the bone and open the chest up,

and then we put them on what's called a heart-lung machine.

This is a machine that supported their circulation while we were moving the heart.

And then we actually removed the heart heart we cut the heart out.

And then we would take this artificial heart and it divided two pieces.

We'd sew one piece in and then sew the other piece in and we click it together and then start a pumping.

I wanted to make an artificial kidney that would save people and I was convinced that I could do it. And I was convinced that I could do it and I clung to it until it was done.

Over the past 60 years, the impossible has become routine thanks to these dedicated doctors. You may not know their names,

but there's a decent chance you or someone you love will one day live because of them.

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