Richard Lower (surgeon)

Richard Rowland Lower ( born August 15, 1929 in Detroit, † 17 May, 2008 Twin Bridges, Montana ) was an American heart surgeon, who was one of the pioneers of heart transplantation.

Life

Lower educated at Amherst College and Cornell University (MD 1955). He was an assistant professor of surgery at Stanford University, where he (with whom he was friends ) with Norman Shumway since the 1950s, research at the technology of heart transplantation (then as a resident ). 1959 transplanted a heart in a dog who survived eight days, whereas previously the dogs usually only survived hours. He went to the 1965 Medical College of Virginia in Richmond (Virginia ), where he received a full professorship in 1967 for surgery. In 1989, he went into retirement.

He belonged to the American surgeons who shortly before a heart transplant were the mid-1960s, when he Christiaan Barnard, who had studied in the previous year (1966 ) with him the techniques to South Africa, where less stringent rules for the transplantation existed forestalled. How to Lower later said this was for him first a shock, he ended up being the only one who Barnard on the U.S. surgeons congress where he lectured about his transplant and where he was at that time generally cut by the U.S. surgeon congratulated after his lecture. Lauer himself led his first transplant in humans in 1968 on a 54 - year-old patient from, who survived one week. His next transplant patient, a 43 -year-old also in 1968, survived six and a half years, and until his retirement he led a total of 393 transplants. Was interrupted this career, as he was in 1968, sued by the survivors of a brain-dead organ donor in Virginia that were not requested in advance by consent. The process was established in 1972 chose him, but took until then much of his time and has been seen in the United States as a test case for such cases. In the 1970s, he was with Shumway one of the few United in the states that proceeded to study heart transplants, despite negative media coverage, after a series of failures, mainly due to repulsion effects, which is significantly improved with the introduction of cyclosporine in the late 1970s.

In the 1990s, he had several years own ranch with 300 cattle, but then returned once in the practice of medicine and practiced at a hospital for the poorer classes in Richmond.

In 1983 he received the Ernst Jung Prize.

He was married and had five children.