Dr. William P. Murphy Jr., a biomedical engineer who invented the vinyl blood bag that replaced breakable bottles in the Korean War and made transfusions safe and reliable on battlefields, hospitals and battlefields, has died. natural disasters and accidents. Thursday at his home in Coral Gables, Florida. He was 100 years old.
His death was confirmed Monday by Mike Tomás, president and CEO of US Stem Cell, a Florida company of which Dr. Murphy had long been president. He became president emeritus last year.
Dr. Murphy, the son of a Nobel Prize-winning Boston physician, is also widely credited with early advances in the development of pacemakers to stabilize erratic heart rhythms, artificial kidneys to cleanse the blood of impurities, and many sterile devices. including trays, scalpel blades, syringes, catheters and other surgical and patient care items that are used once and discarded.
But Dr. Murphy was perhaps best known for his work on the modern blood bag: the flexible, durable, inexpensive sealed container made of polyvinyl chloride that eliminated fragile glass bottles and changed almost everything about blood. storage, portability and ease. to deliver and transfuse blood supplies around the world.
Developed with a colleague, Dr. Carl W. Walter, in 1949-50, the bags are lightweight, wrinkle-resistant, and tear-resistant. They are easy to handle, preserve red blood cells and proteins, and ensure that blood is not exposed to air for at least six weeks. Blood banks, hospitals and other medical storage facilities depend on its longevity. Drones drop them safely in remote areas.
In 1952, Dr. Murphy joined the United States Public Health Service as a consultant and, at the behest of the military, traveled to Korea during the war to demonstrate, with teams of doctors, the use of blood bags to transfuse wounded soldiers. at the supply stations near the front lines.
“It was the first major test of the bags under battlefield conditions, and it was a resounding success,” Dr. Murphy said in a telephone interview from his home for this obituary in 2019. Over time, he noted, the bags were They became a pillar. of the blood collection and storage networks of the American Red Cross and similar organizations abroad.
(For years, researchers have said that an ingredient in polyvinyl chlorides, diethylhexyl phthalate, or DEHP, used in the manufacture of building materials, clothing and many health care products, poses a cancer risk to people. Since 2008, Congress has banned DEHP in children’s products in the United States, the European Union has required labels, and alternative chemicals have replaced DEHP in blood bags.
In Korea, Dr. Murphy recalled, he saw army doctors reusing needles to transfuse patients, and medical instruments were often not properly sterilized. Alarmed by the dangers of infection, he designed a series of relatively inexpensive medical trays stocked with sterilized medications and surgical instruments that could be discarded after a single use, greatly reducing the risks of cross-contamination to patients.
In 1957 he founded Medical Development Corporation, a Miami company that two years later became Cordis Corporation, developer and manufacturer of devices to diagnose and treat heart and vascular diseases. With Dr. Murphy as chief engineer, president, CEO and president, Cordis produced what he called the first synchronous cardiac pacemaker.
As the use of implanted pacemakers became more common in the 1960s and 1970s, Dr. Murphy said, he saw that the devices could be improved to respond not only to irregular heart rhythms (usually an abnormally slow heartbeat) but also to signs of bleeding, tissue damage, blood clots, or problems with the pacemaker electrodes reach the heart muscle.
These complications led him and his team to develop a new generation of pacemakers that could be programmed externally. From this effort emerged the first “dual demand” pacemaker of the 1980s, with probes in two of the heart’s chambers to obtain a more complete picture of the organ’s activity and its progressive defects.
The advanced Cordis pacemaker contained a small computer that could detect heart problems and actually hold two-way electronic conversations with a cardiologist. The cardiologist could, in turn, devise non-invasive solutions and program the computer to carry them out.
Additionally, Dr. Murphy said, his team devised better ways to virtually “see” inside the vascular system. His motorized pressure device precisely injected a small dose of liquid, containing iodine for color, into a selected container. There, the fluid appeared on an X-ray image, called angiography, providing a window into the corners where blockages might be lurking.
To clear blockages, Dr. Murphy and his colleague, Robert Stevens, devised vascular catheters, or sterile probes, that allowed access to blockages in the vessels. (Today angiographic injectors They have a space-age robotic appearance, with small cameras and lights on the probes and a television screen on the outside to guide the doctor through the tunnels).
With Dr. Murphy, Cordis also ventured into artificial kidneys, which cleanse the blood of waste products that normally accumulate in the body. Vital to the maintenance of life, cleansing occurs when blood flows over one side of a membrane while a bath of chemicals flows over the other. Impurities from the blood pass through small pores in the membrane into the bath and are carried away.
Dr. Willem J. Kolff, a Dutch doctor, made the first artificial kidney during World War II. It was a Rube Goldberg contraption: sausage casings wrapped around a wooden drum that rotated in a saline solution. Dr. Murphy’s device used densely packed hollow fibers of synthetic resins as filters. Despite its inefficiencies, it was widely used in implanted or portable artificial kidneys.
Subsequent advances in artificial kidneys and dialysis have given thousands of patients with failing kidneys access to treatment and prolonged lives. But the devices are not yet on par with the efficient human kidney; Bioengineered kidneys remain a hope for the future.
Dr. Murphy retired from Cordis in 1985 to pursue other commercial medical interests. By then, he held 17 patents, had written about 30 articles for professional journals, and had received the Distinguished Service Award from the North American Society for Stimulation and Electrophysiology. He received the Lemelson-MIT Lifetime Achievement Award in 2003 and was inducted into the National Inventors Hall of Fame in 2008.
William Parry Murphy Jr. was born on November 11, 1923 in Boston. His father, a hematologist, shared the year 1934. Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine for a study that showed that a raw liver diet could improve the effects of pernicious anemia. Her mother, Harriett (Adams) Murphy, was the first woman to become a licensed dentist in Massachusetts.
William Jr. and his older sister, Priscilla, grew up in the Boston suburb of Brookline. As a teenager, Priscilla became the youngest qualified pilot in the country, but she died shortly afterward in a small plane crash in a snowstorm near Syracuse, New York, on a night medical relief flight from Boston.
Fascinated by mechanics since he was a child, William devised a gasoline-powered snow blower, whose design he sold to a company.
After graduating from Milton Academy in Massachusetts, he studied premedicine at Harvard, where his father taught, graduating in 1946. He earned his medical degree from the University of Illinois at Chicago in 1947. While studying mechanical engineering for a year at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, developed a film projector to display enlarged x-ray images to the medical public.
Dr. Murphy interned at St. Francis Hospital in Honolulu, then practiced medicine briefly at Peter Bent Brigham Hospital (now Brigham and Women’s Hospital) in Boston before beginning his career in biomedical engineering.
In 1943 he married Barbara Eastham, a Chinese-born American linguist. They divorced in the early 1970s. 1973, Dr. Murphy married Beverly Patterson. She survives him, along with three daughters from his first marriage, Wendy Sorakowski and Christine and Kathleen Murphy; two grandchildren; and a great-grandson.
After retiring from Cordis, Dr. Murphy and his colleague, John Sterner, in 1986 purchased Hyperion Inc., which designed, manufactured and marketed medical laboratory and diagnostic devices. In 2003, he joined the board of directors of Bioheart, which developed stem cell therapies. He became president of Bioheart in 2010 and later president of US Stem Cell, a successor company.
In 2019, a federal court authorized the Food and Drug Administration to stop American stem cells from injecting patients with an extract made from their own abdominal fat. The action came after three patients suffered serious and permanent eye damage as a result of fat extracts being injected into their eyes to treat macular degeneration. The company had maintained that the extract contained stem cells with healing and regenerative powers, but medical experts disputed that claim.
By then, Dr. Murphy had become excited about the promise of stem cell research. In 2014, he spoke with a miami conference on the controversial and rapidly growing field of using stem cells derived from bone marrow and umbilical cord blood to treat neurodegenerative conditions, diabetes and heart disease. “That’s a whole new world of regenerative therapy that will be critical to our future,” she said.
Alex Traub contributed reports.
