Bernard Lown facts for kids
Quick facts for kids
Bernard Lown
|
|
|---|---|
.jpg)
Lown at the dedication of the Bernard Lown Peace Bridge, 2008
|
|
| Born |
Boruch Lac
June 7, 1921 Utena, Lithuania
|
| Died | February 16, 2021 (aged 99) Chestnut Hill, Massachusetts, United States
|
| Nationality | Lithuanian |
| Citizenship | Lithuanian American |
| Alma mater | University of Maine Johns Hopkins University School of Medicine |
| Known for | Developer of the defibrillator Co-founder of the International Physicians for the Prevention of Nuclear War |
| Spouse(s) | Louise Lown |
| Scientific career | |
| Fields | Cardiologist, anti-nuclear war activist |
| Institutions | Harvard School of Public Health Brigham and Women’s Hospital |
| Doctoral advisor | Samuel A. Levine |
Bernard Lown (June 7, 1921 – February 16, 2021) was a famous doctor from Lithuania and America. He was a heart specialist, also known as a cardiologist, and an inventor. Dr. Lown created the first direct current defibrillator. This device helps restart a heart that has stopped. He also developed the cardioverter, which fixes fast or irregular heartbeats. He found a new way to use the medicine lidocaine to control heart rhythm problems.
Throughout his career, Dr. Lown focused on two big health challenges. First, he studied why people suddenly die from heart problems. Second, he looked at how stress affects the heart. His work led to many important medical discoveries. For example, he helped create the coronary care unit in hospitals. His ideas made many modern heart surgeries safer and possible. In 1985, Dr. Lown accepted the Nobel Peace Prize. He received it for an organization he helped start, called the International Physicians for the Prevention of Nuclear War. He co-founded this group with a Soviet heart doctor named Yevgeny Chazov.
Dr. Lown was a Professor of Cardiology at the Harvard T.H. Chan School of Public Health. He was also a Senior Physician at the Brigham and Women’s Hospital in Boston. He started the Lown Cardiovascular Center and the Lown Cardiovascular Research Foundation. He also founded the Lown Institute, which works to improve healthcare and society.
Contents
Early Life and Education
Bernard Lown was born in Utena, Lithuania, on June 7, 1921. His birth name was Boruch Lac. His parents were Nison and Bela Lac. His family was Jewish, and one of his grandfathers was a rabbi. When Bernard was 14, his family moved to Maine in the United States. He went to Lewiston High School and finished in 1938.
After high school, Lown studied zoology at the University of Maine. He earned his bachelor's degree in 1942. Then, he went to Johns Hopkins University School of Medicine and became a medical doctor in 1945. He trained at several hospitals, including Yale-New Haven Hospital and Montefiore Medical Center. He also had a special training in heart care at the Peter Bent Brigham Hospital. His teacher and guide in heart medicine was a well-known doctor named Samuel A. Levine.
Inventing the Defibrillator
Dr. Lown helped doctors around the world understand sudden cardiac death. This is when the heart suddenly stops, and it was a main cause of death in many countries. Based on what he saw in patients, Lown believed that sudden heart death could be stopped. He thought people who were saved could live a nearly normal life.
Working with his mentor, Samuel A. Levine, Lown noticed something important. Many people who had heart attacks died because they had to stay in bed for weeks. This long bed rest often led to serious problems like blood clots in the lungs. Doctors at the time strongly disagreed with Lown's idea to get patients out of bed. But Lown showed that letting patients sit in a chair reduced deaths by two-thirds. Once his work was published, this "chair treatment" became common. It helped save many lives and shortened hospital stays.
Before the 1950s, doctors mostly used medicines to treat a very fast and uncontrolled heartbeat called ventricular fibrillation. In 1956, another doctor, Paul Zoll, used electric shocks to restart hearts during surgery. He used alternating current (AC) from a wall socket. But AC current was not safe and could even cause death. In 1959, Lown proved that AC was harmful to the heart and could be deadly.
To find a safer way to restart hearts, Lown worked with an electrical engineer named Baruch Berkowitz. Lown wanted to make sure the new method was both safe and effective. AC current caused burns to muscles and often made the heart beat irregularly.
After a year of experiments, in 1961, Lown and his team found a solution. They showed that a special direct current (DC) electric shock could reliably stop irregular heartbeats. It brought the heart back to a normal rhythm without hurting the heart or other muscles. This special electric wave became known as the "Lown waveform." It helped the defibrillator become accepted worldwide. This invention greatly improved the chances of survival for people with heart disease.
The DC defibrillator changed how doctors could save patients. It also opened the door for new heart surgeries. Dr. Lown's team was the first to use the defibrillator at Peter Bent Brigham Hospital. In 1962, Dr. Donald B. Effler was the first heart surgeon to use the DC defibrillator during surgery. He said this invention made modern heart surgery possible. For example, in 1967, the first coronary artery bypass operation was done. The DC defibrillator made it safe to restore a normal heart rhythm during this surgery.
Lown also explored using the defibrillator for heart rhythms that were not immediately life-threatening. He found that if the electric shock was given at a specific, very short moment in the heart's cycle, it prevented serious problems. He called this method "Cardioversion." The cardioverter and DC defibrillator became very important in coronary care units. These are hospital units where patients with heart problems are watched closely because they are most at risk for sudden heart death.
Besides inventing new technology, Lown found new uses for two common heart medicines: digitalis and lidocaine. In the 1950s, too much digitalis could be deadly for patients with heart failure. Lown discovered that the amount of potassium in the body was key to using digitalis safely. His discovery led to doctors using safer, faster-acting digitalis drugs. He also showed that some water pills (diuretics) could cause potassium loss, which was important for doctors to know.
In 1964, Lown introduced a new use for the drug lidocaine. He showed it could control irregular heart rhythms in the lower chambers of the heart. Lidocaine was then used in heart units to prevent the need for resuscitation. Before this, dentists mostly used lidocaine as a numbing medicine.
Working for Peace
Doctors for Social Responsibility
In early 1961, Dr. Lown brought together a group of doctors from Boston hospitals. They wanted to talk about the growing danger of nuclear war between the USSR and the USA. This was a new topic for doctors in the United States to discuss. Their new group was called Physicians for Social Responsibility (PSR).
The group included other active doctors like Jack Geiger and Victor W. Sidel. By the end of 1961, they had written five articles. These articles described what would happen if a ten-megaton nuclear bomb hit Boston. The U.S. military thought such an attack was possible. These articles were published in a medical journal in May 1962.
These articles encouraged doctors around the world to join the anti-nuclear movement. They also helped the Limited Test Ban Treaty get approved in the U.S. Senate.
Helping War-Injured Children
Dr. Lown also helped organize the Committee of Responsibility to Save War Burned and War Injured Children (COR). He was a main member of this group. COR aimed to bring injured children from Vietnam to the United States for treatment. The goal was to show Americans the terrible effects of the war.
COR was led by Herbert Needelman. It arranged for several American hospitals to treat injured Vietnamese children for free. Dr. John Constable III was one of the first doctors to help. He and other doctors traveled to Vietnam many times to choose children who could be treated.
To bring these very sick children, ambulance planes were needed. Lown led a group to Washington to meet William F. Bundy, a government official. Bundy was convinced to support COR's goal. In 1967, the Pentagon began flying Vietnamese children to the USA.
Doctors Preventing Nuclear War
In 1980, Dr. Lown asked a few doctors to organize against the increasing nuclear threat. This threat grew after the USSR invaded Afghanistan and the Reagan administration was elected. This small group of doctors, with help from Harvard medical students, formed the International Physicians for the Prevention of Nuclear War (IPPNW).
The IPPNW was possible because of the close friendship between Dr. Eugene Chazov and Dr. Lown. Both were heart doctors. They had worked together on sudden heart death research.
Lown led the American team, and Chazov led the Soviet team. They often visited the USSR with other American heart doctors. These visits helped doctors from the two opposing countries talk and understand each other. This laid the groundwork for IPPNW and made it happen. Dr. Lown wrote about these events in his book, Prescription for Survival: A Doctor's Journey to End Nuclear Madness.
The first IPPNW World Congress was held in Virginia in 1981. Eighty medical leaders from twelve countries attended.
In 1982, the second IPPNW Congress took place in Cambridge, England. Over 400 people attended. Famous participants included scientist Carl Sagan and Admiral Noel Gayler. Many distinguished people from the UK, Germany, and Scandinavian countries also attended.
A big moment for IPPNW happened in 1982. Three Soviet doctors and three American doctors appeared on Soviet national television. This was the first time 100 million Soviet viewers heard an open discussion about the effects of nuclear war. The program was later shown in the US.
By 1985, IPPNW had 135,000 doctors in 60 countries.
In December 1985, Lown and Chazov accepted the 1985 Nobel Peace Prize for IPPNW. Soon after, Soviet leader Mikhail Gorbachev invited Lown and Chazov to meet him in the Kremlin. They talked about many important topics. These included Gorbachev's decision to stop nuclear weapons testing and the situation of Nobel winner Andrei Sakharov.
Global Health Work
SatelLife and ProCor
Dr. Lown founded two organizations, SatelLife (1988) and ProCor (1997). They aimed to help doctors in developing countries. They connected doctors to important information about heart disease and how to prevent it. Their goal was to fix unfairness in healthcare around the world. They used technology to make healthcare more equal.
SatelLife used satellites that orbited the Earth. These satellites could reach every place on Earth four times a day. They gave doctors in developing countries access to medical research and information.
ProCor created an internet network for health workers worldwide. This online community allowed doctors and health workers to find reliable medical information about heart disease. It focused on preventing diseases. It also offered an email forum for discussions.
ProCor's global work included The Ashanti-ProCor Project, started in 2006. This project checked how much health workers in the Ashanti Region of Ghana knew about heart disease. It also found out what information they needed to better help patients.
Helping Healthcare Access
In 1996, Lown and other doctors formed the Ad Hoc Committee to Defend Healthcare. This group wanted to create a single-payer healthcare system in Massachusetts. This means one public system would pay for everyone's healthcare.
In 1997, over 2000 Massachusetts doctors signed a letter. It was published in a medical journal and explained why a single-payer system was needed. The committee gathered 100,000 signatures to put the issue on the ballot for voters.
In 2000, the issue was put to a vote in Massachusetts. Even with strong opposition, 45% of voters supported the idea of single-payer healthcare.
The Lown Institute and Right Care Alliance
In 2012, the Lown Cardiovascular Research Foundation changed its name to The Lown Institute. The Lown Institute works on big problems in US healthcare. These include too much treatment, not enough treatment, and wrong treatment. They do this through research, programs, and meetings. The Institute holds a yearly conference where new research on overuse and underuse of medical care is shared. Doctors and patient advocates can also share ideas there.
The Lown Institute also gives out the Shkreli Awards. These awards are named after Martin Shkreli and highlight "worst examples of profiteering and dysfunction in health care." In 2020, the award went to the Trump administration’s task force for personal protective equipment (PPE).
The Right Care Alliance (RCA) is like a sister organization to The Lown Institute. It is the part that works for change. The Right Care Alliance brings together doctors, patients, and community members. They form a group that works for a healthcare system that is available to everyone, affordable, safe, and effective. The RCA has different groups for different medical specialties and regions. They hold a yearly "week of action" where members show how to give caring, patient-focused care.
In 2018, the organization started looking at data from 3,200 hospitals. They wanted to see how well hospitals performed in terms of fairness for different races and health equality. Their report was released in 2021.
Personal Life
Bernard Lown married Louise Lown, who was his cousin, in 1946. They were married until she passed away in 2019. They had three children together: Anne, Fredric, and Naomi.
Dr. Lown died on February 16, 2021, at his home in Chestnut Hill, Massachusetts. He was 99 years old. Before he died, he had heart failure and pneumonia.
Awards and Honors
Dr. Lown received many awards. These include the Golden Door Award, the Dr. Paul Dudley White Award, and the Distinguished Medical Alumnus Award. He also received the highest honor from Lithuania, the Cross of Commander of the Order of the Lithuanian Grand Duke Gediminas. He won the Gandhi Peace Award and the first Cardinal Medeiros Peace Award. He also received 21 honorary degrees from universities around the world. In 1993, he gave the Indira Gandhi Memorial Lecture in New Delhi.
The bridge connecting the cities of Lewiston and Auburn in Maine was renamed The Bernard Lown Peace Bridge in 2008. This happened after the state government passed a law signed by Governor John Baldacci.
In 2009, the Brigham and Women's Hospital created the Bernard Lown Educational award. Hospital staff and students choose the person who receives this award.
The International Physicians for the Prevention of Nuclear War, which Lown helped create, won the 1985 Nobel Peace Prize.
Harvard School of Public Health Honors
The Lown Scholars Program at the Harvard School of Public Health helps promising health professionals. These are people who live and work in low- and middle-income countries. The program aims to create a group of talented health professionals worldwide. They will use public health tools to prevent heart disease and improve heart health.
The Lown Visiting Professor
In 2012, a special visiting professorship was created. This professor helps coordinate courses for the Lown Scholars. They also help promote programs to prevent heart disease in low- and middle-income countries.
