Engineering Education "Today in History" Blog: First artificial heart transplant and commercial nuclear power plant
by Alice Agogino
closeAuthor: Alice Agogino
Name: Alice Agogino
Email: agogino@berkeley.edu
Site: http://www.me.berkeley.edu/faculty/agogino/
About: Alice M. Agogino is the Roscoe and Elizabeth Hughes Professor of Mechanical Engineering and is affiliated faculty at the Haas School of Business in their Operations and Information Technology Management Group. Her research interests include: community-based design; sustainable engineering; intelligent learning systems; information retrieval and data mining; multiobjective and strategic product design; nonlinear optimization; probabilistic modeling; intelligent control and manufacturing; sensor validation, fusion and diagnostics; wireless sensor networks; multimedia and computer-aided design; design databases; design theory and methods; MEMS/NEMS synthesis and computer-aided design; artificial intelligence and decision and expert systems; and gender/ethnic equity.
She has served in a number of administrative positions at UC Berkeley, including Chair of the Faculty Senate, Associate Dean of Engineering and Faculty Assistant to the Executive Vice Chancellor and Provost in Educational Development and Technology. Prof. Agogino also served as Director for Synthesis, an NSF-sponsored coalition of eight universities with the goal of reforming undergraduate engineering education, and continues as PI for the NEEDS (www.needs.org) and SMETE.ORG digital libraries of courseware in science, mathematics, engineering and technology.
Prof. Agogino received a B.S. in Mechanical Engineering from the University of New Mexico (1975), M.S. degree in Mechanical Engineering (1978) from the University of California at Berkeley and Ph.D. from the Department of Engineering-Economic Systems at Stanford University (1984). Prior to joining the faculty at UC Berkeley, she worked in industry for Dow Chemical, General Electric and SRI International. She has authored over 150 scholarly publications; has won numerous teaching, best paper and research awards; and is a member of the National Academy of Engineering (NAE). At NAE she served on the Committee on Engineering Education, working on the Technologically Speaking and the Engineer 2020 projects. She is currently a member of the National Research Council's Board on Education and the Women in Academic Science Engineering Committee. She has supervised 66 MS projects/theses, 26 doctoral dissertations and numerous undergraduate researchers.See Authors Posts (601) · December 2nd, 2008 · Add a Comment
Today in History – December 2, 1982- Dr. William C. DeVries carried out a series of five implants in Utah over the next three years using the Jarvik total artificial heart. Although the first patients did not live past a year, further patients received the artificial heart designed by Robert K. Jarvik, MD, as a temporary device while awaiting heart transplants. The unusual openness of this medical experiment allowed doctors and designers to learn how to improve the clinical outcomes in subsequent patients with the Jarvik 7, “a device that is still used today and has the highest success rate of any mechanical heart or assist device in the world.” For more information see the Engineering Pathway’s educational resources on the Jarvik artificial heart and the human heart and heart transplants.
Readers may want to view our November 29 blog on the first open heart surgery in 1994 that laid the foundation for today’s heart surgery. Working as a team, the Johns Hopkins Hospital’s chief surgeon, Dr. Alfred Blalock (center photo), surgical technician Vivien T. Thomas (portrait, second from right), and pediatric cardiologist Dr. Helen Taussig (right photo) developed a method for improving the flow of oxygen into the blood by connecting one of the heart’s major arteries with another feeding into the lungs.
For more information, see the Engineering Pathway’s resources on biomedical engineering or go to the Biomedical Engineering and Bioengineering Education Community site.
Also on this date in history in 1957 the first full-scale U.S. nuclear power plant begins operating in Shippingport, Pennsylvania – 15 years to the day after Fermi’s experiment at the University of Chicago. The reactor plant was designed by the Westinghouse Electric Corporation in cooperation with the Division of Naval Reactors of the Atomic Energy Commission. The Shippingport nuclear powerplant was retired in 1982. Concerns about public safety, terrorist use of nuclear materials and the Three Mile Island nuclear accident killed the commerical nuclear indutry in the U.S. However, the nuclear option is being reconsidered in light of its lighter environmental impact over fossil fuels for generating electricity. As with all technologies, engineers must work with the public to evaluate the ethical and social consequences of any technological development and deployment. See the Engineering Pathway’s educational resources on nuclear energy or visit the Nuclear Engineering Education community site for more information.
Tags: BioEngineering and Biomedical Engineering · Chemical, Biochemical, Biomolecular Engineering · General Engineering, Engineering Science · Nuclear Engineering
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