Monday, August 11, 2003

Though he was nominated three times, Peter Safar never won the Nobel Prize for medicine. He should have, though, because the work of the Pitt physician who died Sunday from cancer was used by ordinary people to save countless lives.

Dr. Safar was the renowned "father of CPR," cardiopulmonary resuscitation. His ability in the 1950s to pioneer the combination of mouth-to-mouth resuscitation and closed-chest cardiac compression put a new lifesaving technique literally in the hands of the public. Knowing the rescue potential of CPR, he was passionate about teaching it to anyone so that stricken victims could be saved anytime, anywhere.

The Austrian-born doctor, whose career took him from Peru to Baltimore to the University of Pittsburgh in 1961, was known for other groundbreaking work. He helped to develop standards for ambulance design and the training of emergency medical personnel. He was instrumental in shaping the modern intensive care unit and in collaborating on the first CPR training dummy.

In 1979, he founded the International Resuscitation Research Center at Pitt, which studies secondary injuries that follow traumatic brain injury, cardiopulmonary arrest and hemorrhage. His leadership was so strong and his findings so pivotal that the center was renamed for him when he stepped down as director 15 years later.

The breakthrough he ultimately tried to achieve was sparing the brain, like the heart and lungs, from potentially fatal damage. With the tragic motivation of the 1966 death of his 11-year-old daughter after an asthma attack, Dr. Safar worked to advance the use of body cooling techniques to buy time for other lifesaving measures. Research continues on the procedures today at the Safar Center.

Perhaps someday his colleagues will achieve the kind of progress on brain resuscitation that Peter Safar did on hearts and lungs. That way, they could add a second C, for cerebral, to CPR and achieve his goal of CPCR. It would be hard to imagine a greater tribute to the good doctor.

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