Dr. William P. Murphy Jr., a biomedical engineer who was an inventor of the vinyl blood bag that changed breakable bottles in the Korean War and made transfusions protected and dependable on battlefields, in hospitals and at scenes of pure disasters and accidents, died on Thursday at his dwelling in Coral Gables, Fla. He was 100.
His loss of life was confirmed on Monday by Mike Tomás, the president and chief govt of U.S. Stem Cell, a Florida firm for which Dr. Murphy had lengthy served as chairman. He turned chairman emeritus final 12 months.
Dr. Murphy, the son of a Nobel Prize-winning Boston doctor, was additionally extensively credited with early advances in the growth of pacemakers to stabilize erratic coronary heart rhythms, of synthetic kidneys to cleanse the blood of impurities, and of many sterile gadgets, together with trays, scalpel blades, syringes, catheters and different surgical and patient-care gadgets which are used as soon as and thrown away.
But Dr. Murphy was maybe finest recognized for his work on the trendy blood bag: the sealed, versatile, sturdy and cheap container, made of polyvinyl chloride, that did away with fragile glass bottles and altered virtually the whole lot about the storage, portability and ease of delivering and transfusing blood provides worldwide.
Developed with a colleague, Dr. Carl W. Walter, in 1949-50, the baggage are gentle, wrinkle-resistant and tear proof. They are straightforward to deal with, protect pink blood cells and proteins, and make sure that the blood is just not uncovered to the air for at least six weeks. Blood banks, hospitals and different medical storage services depend upon their longevity. Drones drop them safely into distant areas.
In 1952, Dr. Murphy joined the United States Public Health Service as a guide and, at the behest of the Army, went to Korea throughout the warfare there to display, with groups of medics, the use of the blood baggage in transfusing wounded troopers at support stations close to the entrance traces.
“It was the first major test of the bags under battlefield conditions, and it was an unqualified success,” Dr. Murphy stated in a phone interview from his dwelling for this obituary in 2019. In time, he famous, the baggage turned a mainstay of the blood-collection and storage networks of the American Red Cross and comparable organizations overseas.
(For years, researchers have stated an ingredient in polyvinyl chlorides, diethylhexyl phthalate, or DEHP — utilized in making building supplies, clothes and lots of health care merchandise — poses a most cancers danger to people. Since 2008, Congress has banned DEHP in kids’s merchandise in the U.S.; the European Union has required labels; and different chemical compounds have changed DEHP in blood baggage.)
In Korea, Dr. Murphy recalled, he noticed Army medics reusing needles to transfuse sufferers, and medical devices had been usually inadequately sterilized. Alarmed at the risks of an infection, he designed a collection of comparatively cheap medical trays outfitted with medicine and sterilized surgical instruments that might be discarded after a single use, significantly lowering the dangers of cross-contaminating sufferers.
In 1957, he based the Medical Development Corporation, a Miami firm that two years later turned Cordis Corporation, a developer and maker of gadgets for diagnosing and treating coronary heart and vascular illnesses. With Dr. Murphy as chief engineer, president, chief govt and chairman, Cordis produced what he known as the first synchronous cardiac pacemaker.
As the use of implanted pacemakers turned extra widespread in the 1960s and ’70s, Dr. Murphy stated, he noticed that the gadgets may be improved upon to reply not solely to irregular coronary heart rhythms — often an abnormally gradual beat — but in addition to indicators of bleeding, tissue injury, blood-clot formation or issues with the pacemaker’s electrode leads into the coronary heart muscle.
These problems led him and his group to develop a brand new technology of pacemakers that might be programmed externally. Out of this effort got here the first “dual demand” pacemaker of the 1980s, with probes into two of the coronary heart’s chambers for a fuller image of the organ’s exercise and creeping flaws.
The superior Cordis pacemaker contained a tiny laptop that would detect coronary heart issues and, in impact, have two-way digital conversations with a heart specialist. The heart specialist might, in flip, devise noninvasive options and program the laptop to hold them out.
In addition, Dr. Murphy stated, his group devised higher methods to just about “see” inside the vascular system. His motorized-pressure system injected, with precision, a small dose of liquid, containing iodine for coloration, into a particular vessel. There, the liquid confirmed up on an X-ray picture, known as an angiogram, offering a window into nooks and crannies the place blockages may be lurking.
To take away blockages, Dr. Murphy and a colleague, Robert Stevens, devised sterile vascular catheters, or probes, that allowed entry to obstructions in vessels. (Today’s angiographic injectors have a space-age robotic look, with tiny cameras and lights in the probes and a tv display screen exterior to information the physician’s approach by means of the tunnels.)
Under Dr. Murphy, Cordis additionally ventured into synthetic kidneys, which cleanse the blood of waste merchandise that accumulate usually in the body. Vital to sustaining life, the cleaning happens when blood flows on one aspect of a membrane whereas a shower of chemical compounds flows on the different aspect. Impurities in the blood cross by means of tiny pores in the membrane into the bathtub, and are carried away.
Dr. Willem J. Kolff, a Dutch doctor, made the first synthetic kidney throughout World War II. It was a Rube Goldberg contraption: sausage casings wrapped round a wooden drum rotating in a salt resolution. Dr. Murphy’s system used densely packed hole fibers of artificial resins as filters. Despite its inefficiencies, it was extensively utilized in wearable or implanted synthetic kidneys.
Later developments in synthetic kidneys and dialysis have given 1000’s of sufferers with failing kidneys entry to remedy and extended lives. But the gadgets nonetheless don’t measure as much as the environment friendly human kidney; bioengineered kidneys are nonetheless a hope of the future.
Dr. Murphy retired from Cordis in 1985 to pursue different industrial medical pursuits. By then, he held 17 patents, had written some 30 articles for skilled journals and had acquired the Distinguished Service Award of the North American Society of Pacing and Electrophysiology. He acquired 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 Nov. 11, 1923, in Boston. His father, a hematologist, shared the 1934 Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine for a research that confirmed {that a} food plan of uncooked liver might ameliorate the results of pernicious anemia. His mom, Harriett (Adams) Murphy, was the first lady to develop into a licensed dentist in Massachusetts.
William Jr. and his older sister, Priscilla, grew up in Brookline, the Boston suburb. As an adolescent Priscilla turned the youngest certified feminine pilot in the nation however died shortly afterward in the crash of a small airplane in a snowstorm close to Syracuse, N.Y., on a nighttime medical-mercy flight from Boston.
Fascinated as a boy with mechanics, William devised a gasoline-powered snow blower, whose design he offered to an organization.
After graduating from Milton Academy in Massachusetts, he studied pre-medicine at Harvard, the place his father taught, and graduated in 1946. He earned his medical diploma from the University of Illinois at Chicago in 1947. While finding out mechanical engineering for a 12 months at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, he developed a movie projector to show enlarged X-ray photos to medical audiences.
Dr. Murphy interned at St. Francis Hospital in Honolulu, then practiced medication briefly at Peter Bent Brigham Hospital (now Brigham and Women’s Hospital) in Boston earlier than taking on his profession in biomedical engineering.
In 1943, he married Barbara Eastham, an American linguist who had been born in China. They divorced in the early 1970s. In 1973, Dr. Murphy married Beverly Patterson. She survives him, together with three daughters from his first marriage, Wendy Sorakowski and Christine and Kathleen Murphy; two grandchildren; and one great-grandson.
After retiring from Cordis, Dr. Murphy and a colleague, John Sterner, in 1986 purchased Hyperion Inc., which designed, manufactured and marketed medical laboratory and diagnostic gadgets. In 2003, he joined the board of Bioheart, which developed stem cell therapies. He turned chairman of Bioheart in 2010 and later chairman of U.S. Stem Cell, a successor firm.
In 2019, a federal courtroom empowered the Food and Drug Administration to cease U.S. Stem Cell from injecting sufferers with an extract constituted of their very own stomach fats. The motion got here after three sufferers suffered extreme, everlasting eye injury ensuing from fats extracts injected into their eyes to deal with macular degeneration. The firm had maintained that the extract contained stem cells with therapeutic and regenerative powers, however medical consultants disputed that declare.
Dr. Murphy had by then develop into keen about the promise of stem cell analysis. In 2014, he spoke to a Miami conference about the quickly rising and controversial area of utilizing stem cells derived from bone marrow and umbilical twine blood to deal with neurodegenerative circumstances, diabetes and coronary heart illness. “That’s a whole new world of regenerative therapy that’s going to be critical to our future,” he stated.
Alex Traub contributed reporting.
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