 I became interested in this field while I was still a medical student at Baylor College of Medicine working under the direction of Dr. DeVeke. We had a rotation on surgery with Dr. DeVeke in which I had a patient, a young Italian boy, who was here from Italy with his mother. Very nice young man with a dramatic heart disease. The surgery was performed the next day and I was an assistant in the surgery. He initially did well but later that evening his heart stopped. I was massaging the heart after we opened the chest and as long as I massaged the heart the boy was even awake and reached up toward me briefly before he was sedated at one time. So we couldn't start the heart and had to abandon our efforts to save this young man. It seemed to me that my hand could keep this boy alive. We should be able to make a device that would do the same thing and of course it was a painful experience losing that young boy and of course so I'll never still hear his mother's crying. It turned out to be a lot harder than we thought. But I think of course jump forward 40 years I, it's literally, it's a little over, I guess it was 40 years. On the time that we had this young girl that's done so well we took her to the operating room and opened her chest and I was massaging her heart because her heart had stopped by then and we massaged it externally and then I opened it and I was massaging it while my assistants put her on the heart lung machine using the blood vessels in her leg and we took another pump off the shelf and put it in and the heart started beating again and she recovered and has been over a year since then and she's functioning normally and just got married and just a happy young 21 year old girl who's looking forward to a long life which I hope she'll have and I think it's sort of the end of about a 40 year odyssey in that regard starting with this Italian boy that we couldn't do anything for 40 years ago and working for the idea of something we could pull off the shelf and be life saving and we've done that. Well I think they're important for medicine because it's the purpose of medicine is to alleviate suffering and cure disease if possible and if you can't alleviate the suffering and they do both. These pumps, both of these patients we have are young patients. They're young patients and the deaths are premature deaths. I think that's something that the general population doesn't appreciate. To be able to address those we need a better way of supporting the heart transplant. Well as you've seen these patients can generally do anything they want to do. I think if anybody had seen this young girl at her wedding dancing and jumping around and doing all the things you do at weddings you wouldn't have known she had anything.