ACCIDENTAL MEDICINE
MeDIcal breakthroughs discovered by accident. This week: Heart pacemaker
WILSON GREATBATCH, the American engineer and son of British immigrants, helped save millions of lives by wrongly wiring up a heart rhythm recorder that he was working to invent. He had learnt the basics of electronics during World War II, then studied electrical engineering at university.
Thankfully, his expertise let him down while he tried to create an internal heart rhythm recording device for the U. S. Chronic Disease Research Institute in 1956.
By wrongly fitting an electrical resistor, the device produced electrical pulses instead of simply recording them. It could have been lethal — instead it proved a lifesaver.
Today, the pacemaker is used to monitor the heart’s electrical activity and help control abnormal heart rhythms.