News Release Archive

Plastic surgery and neuroscience advance through trauma. Severe burns, car accidents, war – these and other tragedies push plastic and reconstructive surgeons beyond the limits of collective wisdom to change patients’ lives. WashU Medicine plastic and reconstructive surgeon, Susan Mackinnon, MD, has dedicated her life to developing, refining and expanding a surgical technique called nerve transfer.

Study the anatomy of a human heart, and you’ll notice there are four chambers and four valves that work sequentially to move blood into the heart and then out into the body. As the heart contracts and relaxes, its valves work in a set order, opening and closing to ensure that blood flows in one direction. Advances made in cardiology and heart surgery now allow specialists to repair or replace any of the heart valves using a variety of techniques, including minimally invasive surgery.

Thirty-five years ago, specialists at Washington University School of Medicine and what was then Barnes Hospital played an integral role in advancing the new and developing field of lung transplantation. In January 2023, the Washington University and Barnes-Jewish Transplant Center performed its 2,000^th lung transplantation. Here’s how it happened.

In cities across the U.S., hospitals and other health-care buildings are changing in meaningful ways. A patient room today looks very little like one from the 1950s, the essentials—bed, walls, medical equipment—notwithstanding. Gone are the semi-private rooms, “hospital green” paint, bare metal beds and windowless walls that were prevalent not that long ago. In their place? Private rooms with comfortable beds allowing patient-controlled adjustment, soothing wall colors and artwork, sunlight, space for family to visit and stay overnight if needed—and windows with views to parks and gardens.

Heart failure is the leading cause of death in the US, but modern medical advancements are working towards drastically reducing those rates for decades to come.

It’s 1982, and a man is having a heart attack. An ambulance rushes him to the emergency department, where he’s given a nitroglycerin tablet and a drug called nifedipine.

The treatment doesn’t seem to work, and the man’s heart sustains serious damage. An emergency physician delivers the news to the man’s family: “He might not survive the night. We’ll keep him comfortable, but there’s nothing else we can do.”

For years, this scene was a common one, played out again and again in emergency departments across the nation. Physicians did their best to care for heart attack patients—but their best too often wasn’t enough. That’s because nifedipine and other drugs used at the time simply weren’t effective.

Just a few decades ago, cardiac surgeons, engineers and scientists were working on new technology that would revolutionize open-heart surgery. Specifically, they were developing a device that would act as a patient’s heart and lungs, keeping the body’s blood supply circulating while the heart underwent complex repairs. At Barnes Hospital, now Barnes-Jewish, a solution to the problem arrived in 1956: the Gibbon-Mayo heart-lung pump.

The very first X-ray image is a blurry, ghostlike view of a woman’s left hand, two sizable wedding rings visible on her third finger. Using his wife as his test subject, German physicist Wilhelm Röntgen used the power of the X-ray to gaze at bones beneath his wife’s skin, something he couldn’t have done before without an incision. Six years later, Röntgen won the 1901 Nobel Prize in Physics. The practice of medicine had changed forever.

Some call it the “therapeutic pipeline.” Others refer to it as “bench to bedside.” Both phrases refer to the scientific process that delivers new therapies, new medicines, to people who are sick. In the pipeline metaphor, an idea rushes along, like water in a hose, from the minds of researchers into the lab, through testing and approvals to the pharmacy or treatment room. In the bench metaphor, progress is similarly linear, advancing from the scientist’s bench in the lab to the patient’s bedside. But neither image paints an accurate picture.

The first baby conceived by in vitro fertilization, or IVF, was born in 1978 in Manchester, England. In 1985, a couple from Creve Coeur gave birth to Missouri’s first baby conceived by IVF at what was then called Jewish Hospital. The technology was controversial in its early days. The idea of “creating” a baby in a lab felt strange to some and raised ethical concerns in others.