NEWS TRENDS

The 2008 inductees into the National Inventors Hall of Fame include four men whose inventions radically changed the medical device industry. The inductions, 18 in all, were announced on February 14.

Sir John Charnley is the father of modern hip-replacement surgery. He was honored for his invention of low-frictional torque arthroscopy, a method that was much more effective and less painful for patients than previous procedures. In 1962, he unveiled his invention, which combined a thick plastic socket and a small-diameter, highly polished metal ball to replace the head of the thigh bone. It solved the problem of pain due to pressure on nerves in the hip socket and poor lubrication of the joint. He also developed a clean air enclosure, total body exhaust suits, and an instrument tray system that go along with the replacement procedure.

Willem Einthoven produced the first reliable electrocardiogram. He designed the first instrument, the string galvometer, to accurately record the electrical activity of the heart and detect abnormal heart function. He did it by putting a quartz wire under tension in a magnetic field. It moved when exposed to an electrical current, and he photographed the movements. He was also a pioneer in the study of heart sounds, retinal currents, and acoustics.

William P. Murphy Jr., who founded the company that became Cordis Corp. (now part of Johnson & Johnson), invented a number of medical devices and packages. Among his brainchildren are the disposable medical procedure tray, the modern blood bag, the physiologic cardiac pacemaker, the angiographic injector, and the hollow-fiber artificial kidney.

Based on his observations from the Korean War, Murphy created a compression system for sealed blood bags that allowed for efficient and safe pressure transfusions. And when he noticed that reprocessing often damaged reused medical devices, he designed inexpensive trays of drugs and sterilized instruments that could be discarded after one use.

David Pall was credited with more than 181 patents related to filtration, most notably the leukocyte filter, which makes blood transfusions safer. The invention helped prevent the rejection of transfused blood and the transmission of bloodborne diseases by transfusion.

He founded Pall Corp. to develop filtration systems for aerospace, but eventually turned his efforts to healthcare. The firm makes fluid management systems used in the manufacturing and administering of medical devices.

Murphy is still living. Charnley died in 1982, Einthoven in 1927, and Pall in 2004.

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