which recognized no impediments that couldn ’ t be overcome .

It was an exciting time , to be sure . In 1954 I was eight years old , living in Jersey City and just beginning to understand the virtues of washing dishes in my father ’ s restaurant . It was situated across the street from the medical center , where the accounts of these new achievements were prominent . The established journals of the day , Life and Look magazines , chronicled every advance , it seemed , with pictures and real-life stories .

During this time , my grammar school classmate Joyann Donaldson appeared to have what I later learned was some kind of cyanotic heart disease . We knew this because her complexion was rose-blue . Then one day she went away . There was some talk of an operation . I never knew where she went or what was done , but she never returned to school . Later , a high school classmate , Marty Lerner , who was scheduled to matriculate at Rutgers University with me in the fall of 1964 , died the summer before our freshman year of unrepaired congenital heart disease . One can never be sure about the influences of life ’ s experience , but when I was 11 or 12 years old , I told my classmates that I was going to be a heart surgeon . What followed was an unwavering commitment to this end . It was highlighted by academic studies , Boy Scouts , and a lot of sports — football , baseball , fencing , and longdistance running — all of which were fueled by intellectual curiosity and living the “ sound mind in a sound body ” philosophy .

As a medical student at the University of Virginia , I witnessed all sorts of surgical innovations being practiced . These included closed mitral valvuloplasty to treat patients with rheumatic heart disease , coronary bypass for blocked arteries , mitral and aortic valve replacements , and procedures to treat children with congenital heart disease . The pediatric patients were especially challenging because of the uniqueness of each case and their small size . So I decided to pursue pediatric cardiovascular thoracic surgery as a specialty .

Breakthroughs to help patients In those days , surgeons were plagued by the problem of heart muscle preservation during open heart surgery . Even a perfectly performed technical operation could result in mortality because of poor heart muscle preservation during the operation . As an intern at the University of California – San Francisco ( UCSF ) in 1973 , I saw what was described to me as the first human application of cold crystalline cardioplegia . This was a high-potassium cold solution that was infused into the coronary arteries . It had the double effect of stopping the heart to allow an accurate operation and cooling the muscle to preserve the heart function during this time period . Now it was possible to extend the length of time for the operation , giving surgeons an opportunity to perform more complex operations without endangering the heart muscle .

This applied technology would profoundly affect the survival of patients with severe heart disease . In 1975 I entered the research laboratory for a year , during which time I did my part for this clinical metamorphosis by studying the effects of cold cardioplegia on heart muscle ,