It Can't All Be Energy: A heart surgeon leads his city to the forefront of medical innovation
The 56-year-old heart surgeon turned medical device inventor (ninety U.S. patents granted or pending, sixty international!) turned entrepreneur (started six companies!) turned corporate innovation guru (catch his TEDMED talk!) had, over several recent days, attended to his usual businesses while als...
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| Published in: | Texas monthly (Austin) 2017-05 |
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| Main Author: | |
| Format: | Magazinearticle |
| Language: | eng |
| Subjects: | |
| Online Access: | Get full text |
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| Summary: | The 56-year-old heart surgeon turned medical device inventor (ninety U.S. patents granted or pending, sixty international!) turned entrepreneur (started six companies!) turned corporate innovation guru (catch his TEDMED talk!) had, over several recent days, attended to his usual businesses while also showing up at a board meeting of the 21st Century Cardiothoracic Surgical Society, in Puerto Rico, and the Design to Value Summit, in New Jersey. [...]bass guitar.) Just that morning, Cohn had put an aortic heart valve in a human patient at Baylor St. Luke's Medical Center before showing up fashionably late for a photo shoot; his smiling image was needed to promote an entirely new venture in Houston. The corporate monolith Johnson & Johnson was opening, in a repurposed Nabisco cookie factory, the Center of Device Innovation (CDI), a design hub for new products that would, per the company's press release, transform health care around the country and the world. The products can range from the mundane to the almost incomprehensibly complex--a better bandage or pair of scissors or tongue depressor, new artificial hips and knees, heart valves, pacemakers, catheters of all kinds, dialysis machines, even an artificial heart. The golden age of medical device innovation took place from the fifties to the seventies, dovetailing with the space program and the enthusiastic government support of science and medicine, the last of which happened in large part because of Houston heart surgeon Michael DeBakey's relentless demands for government funding to improve the health of all Americans. Even though the... |
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| ISSN: | 0148-7736 2163-3274 |