William P. Murphy Jr., an Inventor of the Trendy Blood Bag, Dies at 100

Dr. William P. Murphy Jr., a biomedical engineer who was an inventor of the vinyl blood bag that changed breakable bottles within the Korean Warfare and made transfusions protected and dependable on battlefields, in hospitals and at scenes of pure disasters and accidents, died on Thursday at his residence in Coral Gables, Fla. He was 100.

His demise was confirmed on Monday by Mike Tomás, the president and chief government of U.S. Stem Cell, a Florida firm for which Dr. Murphy had lengthy served as chairman. He grew to become chairman emeritus final 12 months.

Dr. Murphy, the son of a Nobel Prize-winning Boston doctor, was additionally extensively credited with early advances within the growth of pacemakers to stabilize erratic coronary heart rhythms, of synthetic kidneys to cleanse the blood of impurities, and of many sterile units, together with trays, scalpel blades, syringes, catheters and different surgical and patient-care gadgets which are used as soon as and thrown away.

However Dr. Murphy was maybe finest recognized for his work on the trendy blood bag: the sealed, versatile, sturdy and cheap container, product of polyvinyl chloride, that did away with fragile glass bottles and altered nearly all the things in regards to 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’re straightforward to deal with, protect pink blood cells and proteins, and be certain that the blood just isn’t uncovered to the air for at the very least six weeks. Blood banks, hospitals and different medical storage amenities rely upon their longevity. Drones drop them safely into distant areas.

In 1952, Dr. Murphy joined america Public Well being Service as a advisor and, on the behest of the Military, went to Korea throughout the conflict there to display, with groups of medics, the usage of the blood baggage in transfusing wounded troopers at support stations close to the entrance traces.

“It was the primary main check of the baggage underneath battlefield circumstances, and it was an unqualified success,” Dr. Murphy stated in a phone interview from his residence for this obituary in 2019. In time, he famous, the baggage grew to become a mainstay of the blood-collection and storage networks of the American Purple Cross and related organizations overseas.

(For years, researchers have stated an ingredient in polyvinyl chlorides, diethylhexyl phthalate, or DEHP — utilized in making constructing supplies, clothes and lots of well being care merchandise — poses a most cancers threat to people. Since 2008, Congress has banned DEHP in kids’s merchandise within the U.S.; the European Union has required labels; and different chemical substances have changed DEHP in blood baggage.)

In Korea, Dr. Murphy recalled, he noticed Military medics reusing needles to transfuse sufferers, and medical devices have been typically inadequately sterilized. Alarmed on the risks of an infection, he designed a collection of comparatively cheap medical trays outfitted with medication and sterilized surgical instruments that might be discarded after a single use, vastly lowering the dangers of cross-contaminating sufferers.

In 1957, he based the Medical Growth Company, a Miami firm that two years later grew to become Cordis Company, a developer and maker of units for diagnosing and treating coronary heart and vascular illnesses. With Dr. Murphy as chief engineer, president, chief government and chairman, Cordis produced what he referred to as the primary synchronous cardiac pacemaker.

As the usage of implanted pacemakers grew to become extra widespread within the Sixties and ’70s, Dr. Murphy stated, he noticed that the units is likely to 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 harm, blood-clot formation or issues with the pacemaker’s electrode leads into the center muscle.

These problems led him and his workforce to develop a brand new technology of pacemakers that might be programmed externally. Out of this effort got here the primary “twin demand” pacemaker of the Eighties, with probes into two of the center’s chambers for a fuller image of the organ’s exercise and creeping flaws.

The superior Cordis pacemaker contained a tiny laptop that might detect coronary heart issues and, in impact, have two-way digital conversations with a heart specialist. The heart specialist may, in flip, devise noninvasive options and program the pc to hold them out.

As well as, Dr. Murphy stated, his workforce devised higher methods to nearly “see” contained in the vascular system. His motorized-pressure machine injected, with precision, a small dose of liquid, containing iodine for shade, into a particular vessel. There, the liquid confirmed up on an X-ray picture, referred to as an angiogram, offering a window into nooks and crannies the place blockages is likely to 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. (Right this moment’s angiographic injectors have a space-age robotic look, with tiny cameras and lights within the probes and a tv display screen outdoors to information the physician’s approach by means of the tunnels.)

Beneath Dr. Murphy, Cordis additionally ventured into synthetic kidneys, which cleanse the blood of waste merchandise that accumulate usually within the physique. Important to sustaining life, the cleaning happens when blood flows on one facet of a membrane whereas a shower of chemical substances flows on the opposite facet. Impurities within the blood move by means of tiny pores within the membrane into the bathtub, and are carried away.

Dr. Willem J. Kolff, a Dutch doctor, made the primary synthetic kidney throughout World Warfare II. It was a Rube Goldberg contraption: sausage casings wrapped round a wooden drum rotating in a salt resolution. Dr. Murphy’s machine used densely packed hole fibers of artificial resins as filters. Regardless of 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. However the units nonetheless don’t measure as much as the environment friendly human kidney; bioengineered kidneys are nonetheless a hope of the longer term.

Dr. Murphy retired from Cordis in 1985 to pursue different business 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 Nationwide Inventors Corridor 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 Medication for a research that confirmed {that a} food plan of uncooked liver may ameliorate the results of pernicious anemia. His mom, Harriett (Adams) Murphy, was the primary lady to turn into a licensed dentist in Massachusetts.

William Jr. and his older sister, Priscilla, grew up in Brookline, the Boston suburb. As a young person Priscilla grew to become the youngest certified feminine pilot within the nation however died shortly afterward within the crash of a small aircraft 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 bought 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 College of Illinois at Chicago in 1947. Whereas learning mechanical engineering for a 12 months on the Massachusetts Institute of Know-how, he developed a movie projector to show enlarged X-ray photographs to medical audiences.

Dr. Murphy interned at St. Francis Hospital in Honolulu, then practiced medication briefly at Peter Bent Brigham Hospital (now Brigham and Ladies’s Hospital) in Boston earlier than taking over his profession in biomedical engineering.

In 1943, he married Barbara Eastham, an American linguist who had been born in China. They divorced within the early Seventies. 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 units. In 2003, he joined the board of Bioheart, which developed stem cell therapies. He grew to become chairman of Bioheart in 2010 and later chairman of U.S. Stem Cell, a successor firm.

In 2019, a federal court docket empowered the Meals and Drug Administration to cease U.S. Stem Cell from injecting sufferers with an extract made out of their very own stomach fats. The motion got here after three sufferers suffered extreme, everlasting eye harm ensuing from fats extracts injected into their eyes to deal with macular degeneration. The corporate had maintained that the extract contained stem cells with therapeutic and regenerative powers, however medical specialists disputed that declare.

Dr. Murphy had by then turn into enthusiastic in regards to the promise of stem cell analysis. In 2014, he spoke to a Miami convention in regards to 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 complete new world of regenerative remedy that’s going to be essential to our future,” he stated.

Alex Traub contributed reporting.