TOP 100 SCIENCE SITES
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| Annual Leonids meteor shower set to reach peak The annual Leonids meteor shower is set to reach its peak. news.bbc.co.uk |
NASA puzzled why parachutes failed in rocket test CAPE CANAVERAL, Fla. (AP) -- NASA still isn't sure why two parachutes failed during a test flight of its prototype moon rocket just over a month ago.... hosted.ap.org |
William Ganz obituary Cardiologist and co-inventor of the Swan-Ganz catheterWilliam Ganz, who has died aged 90, was the co-inventor, with Jeremy Swan, of the Swan-Ganz balloon catheter, which brought simplicity and safety to a previously hazardous method of diagnosing heart conditions. In the 1960s there was a new interest in myocardial infarction – heart attack – and a new diagnostic technique, cardiac catheterisation. This involved the difficult and potentially dangerous manoeuvring of the tip of a relatively rigid catheter from a vein in the groin up to the heart, guided by a fluoroscope. It often disturbed the electrical activity of the heart, causing arrhythmias and sometimes death.In 1967, Ganz was approached by Swan, his immediate boss at the Cedars-Sinai medical centre, in Los Angeles. Two days earlier, Swan had performed a particularly difficult catheterisation on a woman with an enlarged heart. The next day, he stood on the beach at Santa Monica watching sailing boats, and thought how good it would be if the catheters could have sails to carry them through the bloodstream. He discussed the possibility with Ganz.They soon modified the idea to use a balloon at the tip of the catheter that could be deflated when it reached its destination. Swan and Ganz published the details of their catheter in 1970 in the New England Journal of Medicine and, not long afterwards, Edwards Lab- oratories began to manufacture it. The Swan-Ganz catheter was faster and safer than anything used before. By the 1990s 2m were sold worldwide each year. However, since 2000 the technique has been in decline as other imaging methods have been introduced.He was born Vilem Ganz in Kosice, Czechoslovakia, near the Hungarian border. Vilem, known as Vili, spoke fluent Czech, Slovak and Hungarian. His father, an accountant, died when he was a few months old and his mother took in lodgers to make ends meet. Ganz started medical studies at Charles University in Prague in 1937. However, the 1938 Munich agreement made Kosice part of Hungary (in 1945 it reverted to Czechoslovakia and is now part of Slovakia), so Ganz became a foreigner in Prague and was made to return to his home town, which had been renamed Kassa. As a Jew, he was detained in a Nazi labour camp, and in 1944 he was scheduled for Auschwitz, but, as he told Swan: "I refused the offer and went underground."After the end of the second world war, he completed his medical studies in Prague, graduating top of the class in 1947. For two decades he worked in Czechoslovakia, but he became disillusioned with communism. In 1966 he took his family ostensibly on holiday to Italy. When he reached Vienna, he applied for a US visa, which was granted because he had relatives in Los Angeles. Contacts got him a job at Cedars-Sinai, where he remained for the rest of his career, changing his name to William.His colleagues Dr Cory Franklin and Professor Krishna Somers confirmed that Ganz was widely believed to be the brains behind the Swan-Ganz procedure. Because of medical licensing regulations in California, Ganz had not been able to get a licence when he first arrived, so he confined himself to the laboratory and needed the patronage of Swan to launch himself in the US. By the 1970s, Ganz was developing general monitoring methods, measuring cardiac output and oxygen levels taken from the pulmonary artery, investigating lung and heart complications of other conditions, including pulmonary failure, septic shock and post-operative conditions in anaesthesia.By the time he co-operated with Swan on the "sail" idea, he was working on thermodilution concepts, measuring left-ventricular volume and cardiac output, and the relation of the right and left ventricles in heart-attack patients, techniques he developed in dogs and transferred successfully to the clinic. In 1982 he and Prediman Shah, the director of cardiology at Mount Sinai, did the first human trials. By pushing the Swan-Ganz catheter into narrow blood vessels near the heart, they found they could also use it to measure blood pressure in those vessels. Ganz also conducted, with Shah, the first studies into dissolving clots within the heart.Ganz was full of old-world charm and courtesy and was popular with patients and colleagues. "Medicine," said his son Tomas, "was his profession, love and hobby." His wife Magda, whom he married in 1945 in Budapest, died in 2005. He is survived by Tomas, a lung specialist, and Peter, a cardiologist. • Vilem (William) Ganz, cardiologist, born 7 January 1919; died 11 November 2009Medical researchCaroline Richmondguardian.co.uk © Guardian News & Media Limited 2009 | Use of this content is subject to our Terms & Conditions | More Feeds guardian.co.uk |
Russia to Plan Deflection of Asteroid From Earth Russia’s top space researchers will hold a meeting to plan a mission to deflect 99942 Apophis, an asteroid that could conceivably hit the Earth two decades from now. feeds.nytimes.com |
Black bear on Internet gives birth to cub in Minn. MINNEAPOLIS (AP) -- A researcher says Lily the black bear has given birth to a cub in her den in northeastern Minnesota.... hosted.ap.org |