User:Starchildwikipedian/sandbox

Nina Starr Braunwald (1928–1992) was a pioneering thoracic surgeon and medical researcher. She was the first woman to be certified by the American Board of Cardiothoracic Surgery, the first woman to perform open-heart surgery, and the first woman to be elected to the American Association for Thoracic Surgery. In 1960, at the age of 32, she led the operative team at the U.S. National Institutes of Health (NIH) that implanted the first successful artificial human heart valve replacement, which she had designed and fabricated (2). She died in August 1992 in Weston, Mass., after a career that included prominent appointments at the NIH, University of California, San Diego, Harvard Medical School, and Brigham and Women's Hospital (3).

Early Life and Career
Nina Starr was born in Brooklyn, New York, in 1928. She received both her baccalaureate and medical degrees from New York University, and from 1952 to 1955 she was among the first women to train in general surgery at New York's Bellevue Hospital (1). She married her college and medical school classmate, Eugene Braunwald, also a cardiovascular researcher, in 1952, with whom she had three daughters (3, 4).

Braunwald completed her training in general surgery at Georgetown University Hospital in Washington, D.C., with a postdoctoral fellowship in the surgical laboratory of Dr. Charles Hufnagel (2), inventor of the first artificial heart valve (5). She joined the NIH National Heart Institute (now the National Heart, Lung, and Blood Institute) in nearby Bethesda, Maryland, in 1958 under the mentorship of Dr. Andrew G. Morrow. She served as Staff Surgeon at the National Heart Institute until 1965, when was named Deputy Chief of the Clinic of Surgery, a position she held until 1968 (6).

During her time at the NIH, Braunwald conducted groundbreaking research in cardiac surgery, focusing primarily upon the development of artificial heart valves. She designed and fabricated a flexible polyurethane mitral valve with Teflon chordae tendinea, also called heart strings, which she implanted into dogs (1). In 1960 she led the operative team that implanted this artificial mitral valve into a 44-year-old woman with a leaky heart valve, known clinically as mitral regurgitation (7).

Braunwald then developed a cloth-covered mechanical valve (the Braunwald-Cutter valve), which was implanted into thousands of patients during the late 1960s and early 1970s. Her other significant contributions include development of the stented aortic homograft (a graft of same-species tissue, in this case human tissue) for mitral valve replacement, surgical treatment of chronic thromboembolic disease, and pioneering techniques for the use of tissue cultures to discourage the formation of clots when prosthetic valves and circulatory assist devices are in use (2). She also, subsequently, pioneered the use of tissue culture techniques to develop nonthrombogenic cell layers and polymer surfaces to provide nonthrombogenic surfaces of prosthetic valves and circulatory assist devices (8). Braunwald received considerable public attention during the 1960s, with articles in Life and Time magazines in which she was described as one of America's young "movers and shakers." (1)

Braunwald left the NIH to accompany her husband, Eugene Braunwald, to the University of California, San Diego, where he was appointed Chief of Medicine and she was appointed Associate Professor of Surgery. Braunwald followed her husband once again, in 1972, to the Boston area, where she became an Associate Professor of Surgery at Harvard Medical School. While at Harvard, she was a Staff Surgeon in the Division of Cardiac and Thoracic Surgery at Brigham and Women’s Hospital, a Staff Surgeon in the Division of Cardiac Surgery at Boston Children’s Hospital, and a Consultant in the Division of Cardiac Surgery at the West Roxbury Veterans Administration Medical Center (6).

Through her career, Braunwald published more than 110 peer-reviewed articles in journals such as Circulation, The New England Journal of Medicine, and the Journal of Thoracic and Cardiovascular Surgery.

Following her death, the Thoracic Surgery Foundation for Research and Education established the Nina Starr Braunwald Research Grant, to recognize Braunwald's commitment to the early academic development of women in cardiac surgery. The award includes two years of research funding support and is given annually to a promising young woman in the field of academic cardiac surgery (9). This foundation also offers the Nina Starr Braunwald Research Fellowship to provide salary and direct experimental support for women cardiac surgical trainees who wish to acquire investigational skills (10). Similarly, the Association of Women Surgeons provides an annual Nina Starr Braunwald Award to a surgical leader who has demonstrated exceptional support of a role for women in academic surgery (11).

Braunwald reportedly struggled for professional opportunities after leaving Morrow's department at the NIH (2). As a mother of three children, she balanced family responsibilities with the hefty demands of cardiac surgery. Her widower, Eugene Braunwald, described her approach to both surgery and parenthood as doing only what she considered essential, doing it intensely, and not spending much time, energy, or motion on anything else. Yet she did manage to pursue her hobbies of painting, sculpture, and horseback riding, and later took great delight in her grandchildren (1). Colleague described her as pioneering, determined, yet gentle (2).

1. http://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0003497500023973 (Nina Starr Braunwald: some reflections on the first woman heart surgeon) 2. http://www.nlm.nih.gov/changingthefaceofmedicine/physicians/biography_41.html (Changing the Face of Medicine) 3. http://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/000349759390003Z# (In Memoriam: Nina S. Braunwald, 1928-1992) 4. http://www.mc.vanderbilt.edu/lens/article/?id=181&pg=999 5. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Charles_A._Hufnagel 6. https://www.womensurgeons.org/aws_library/NSBbio.pdf 7. http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/2673090 8. http://www.surgjournal.com/article/0039-6060(71)90268-6/abstract 9. http://tsfre.org/awards/tsfre-nina-starr-braunwald-research-grant 10. http://tsfre.org/awards/nina-starr-braunwald-research-fellowship 11. https://www.womensurgeons.org/AWS_Foundation/Awards.asp

Wikipedia links to underlined word above http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Eugene_Braunwald http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Charles_A._Hufnagel http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chordae_tendineae http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mitral_insufficiency

Note to editors: false/empty link to Nina S. Braunwald at http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Association_of_Women_Surgeons