Nobel Prizes Explained: Sewing Blood Vessels

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Now our cardiovascular system is really an unappreciated hero of our body. The cardiovascular system is our heart and blood vessels that supply our body with blood.This constant workhorse - it beats so hard you can feel it, it pushes blood so fast you can HEAR the turbulence through your heart valves as the lub dub heart sounds. It pumps about 2.5 billion times in a lifetime, it pushes the equivalent of 2000 gallons of blood through our body every day- and the best thing is? We don’t have to think about it. It supplies us with that sweet sweet oxygen - all automatically.
Now things can obviously go wrong. The leading - LEADING cause of death in the united states is heart disease. Now the cause and mechanism of heart disease we’ll save for another video - but usually there is a blockage of the vessels that supply your heart (your coronary arteries) which leads to heart attacks and death.
We can get pass these blockages with a percutaneous coronary intervention (or PCI - which is placing a little stent in the blood vessels to open it up) or a coronary artery bypass grafting (CABG), which basically takes another blood vessel, and stitches it to your heart to “bypass” diseased arteries.
Now we can use the internal thoracic artery as a graft (in the chest) or the great saphenous vein in the leg. We cut it out (or part of it out) and painstakingly sew it back to the coronary arteries just beyond the blockage - allowing your heart to be supplied. Now often this is done with the heart stopped, using a pump to artificially push blood around. Now with over half a MILLION bypasses done a year, it one of the us most common operations
And one man did more to contribute to these fields than anyone else. Enter Alexis Carrel - A good, but not excellent student, he failed to get a faculty position in France, partly because he failed his exams twice, and partly because he published a report of how a woman with possible tuberculosis was cured after pouring blessed holy water over her stomach. The medical community in France didn’t really want a part of that. So he came to the USA at the University of Chicago.
His interest in medicine really focused around surgery and blood vessel injuries or vascular. Random? Not necessarily. When he was young, the then French president named Sadi Carnot visited his town and was assassinated, being stabbed in the abdomen and dying of internal bleeding due to a severed portal vein (a major blood vessel in the liver). He believed that if the vessel could be repaired or reconnected, then his life would have been saved. Physicians at the time didn’t have the technique to reconnect vessels and usually just cut or ligated them. He would then, using sewing lessons he took from an embroideress and his mom, started working on suturing techniques.
Not only was he able to reconnect torn vessels, but also formed the basis of bypass surgery. Later on his career, with help from engineer and aviator Charles Lindbergh, he would create the first oxygen pump for organ perfusion. This machine took over the heart and lungs function and allowed organ transplant and surgeries of the heart.
He would publish a book called “Man, the Unknown”, which became a best seller. It would detail what he had learned but also problems of the modern world and possible solution.
Those “solution” - included eugenics. After these uh, thoughts, he was more or less forced into retirement. But for his medical work - Alexis Carrel was awarded the Nobel prize in 1912
Disclaimer:
These videos do not provide medical advice and are for informational purposes only. The videos are not intended to be a substitute for professional medical advice, diagnosis or treatment. Always seek the advice of a qualified health provider with any questions you may have regarding a medical condition. Never disregard professional medical advice or delay in seeking it because of something you have read or seen in any LY Med video.

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