General Motors scientists and engineers have had impact in many areas beyond their traditional scope of developing new and better cars and trucks -- from paint and gasoline to solar cells, hydrogen fuel cells, and even the inertial guidance system for NASA’s Apollo moon program.

Believe it or not, one of the lesser known ground-breaking GM research contributions was in medical science rather than transportation, and it is housed permanently at the Smithsonian Institution today.

In 1952, Dr. Forest Dodrill, a surgeon at Wayne State University’s Harper Hospital and President of the Michigan Heart Association, was absolutely confident that a machine could be developed to temporarily replace the human heart’s blood-pumping function and make open heart surgery possible. Several previous devices had been used during surgery with animals. But the issues of how to preserve red corpuscles when blood was pumped through a machine as well as how to prevent blood clotting, hemorrhaging, and infection had to be addressed before a machine could be used for heart surgery on humans.

Dr. Dodrill and his medical team turned to a team of scientists and engineers at the General Motors Research Laboratories, then located in the GM Building Annex in Detroit, to help develop and then build a mechanical heart that would address all these issues.

The result was the Dodrill-GMR Mechanical Heart, built by the GM Research Laboratories at no cost, in the public interest. It measured 10 inches by 12 inches by 17 inches and was described as resembling a 12-cylinder engine, with 6 separate chambers (looking like cylinders). With parts made of stainless steel, glass, and rubber, it used air pressure and vacuum pumps to circulate blood from the 12 chambers through the patient’s body while the heart was being operated on.

The Dodrill-GMR Mechanical Heart (often called the artificial heart or heart pump) was used successfully for the first time in a surgery performed on 41-year-old man at Harper Hospital in the fall of 1952.

As Dr. Dodrill modestly noted in his report for the Journal of American Medicine, "To our knowledge, this is the first instance of the survival of a patient when a mechanical heart was used to take over the complete body function of maintaining the blood supply of the body while the heart was open and operated on."

The operation lasted 80 minutes and the mechanical heart kept the patient alive for 50 minutes while his own heart was repaired. Its success soon made open heart surgery a common practice.

General Motors left the reporting on the Dodrill-GMR Mechanical Heart’s success to the Michigan Heart Association and did not even issue a news release.

With more sophisticated heart-lung machines under development by other medical engineering teams, GM donated the device to the Smithsonian Institution in 1954. Today, it remains in the Museum of American History Division of Science, Medicine, and Society’s permanent collection of milestone medical devices and artifacts. The blueprints for the device and an earlier prototype are also housed at GM’s Heritage Center in Sterling Heights, Michigan.

GM engineers have since teamed with medical experts in many areas of automotive safety, including the development of today’s sophisticated crash dummies. So, while you may not have given it much thought, cars and medicine each have much to thank the other for.

Details regarding this development and GM's involvement were documented in the Journal of Cardiac Surgery, Vol. 17, No. 3, May/June 2002. Dr. Larry Stephenson, Division of Cardiothoracic Surgery at Wayne State University in Detroit, is an expert on the history of this device.

The Dodrill-GMR Mechanical Heart is a 12-cylinder pump for temporarily replacing the human heart during heart surgery. It was the first mechanical heart in the world used successfully to keep a patient's entire bloodstream circulating. This mechanical heart was designed, built and tested cooperatively by Harper Hospital in Detroit, the Michigan Heart Association, and General Motors Research Laboratories (GMRL) (originally a 6 pump unit) in the early 1950s. It has been referrred to as a landmark in cooperative research between medical men and engineers. Medical Science was a auxiliary exhibit by GM Research in the Applied Research section of the Avenue of Progress-New York World's Fair.