5 significant inventions made by Armenian doctors and scholars.
Varazdat Kazanjian
The field of this famous Armenian inventor is rather well known and demanded today. Though fewer of us may recognize the revolutionary pioneer of the field of plastic surgery, the huge input of this Armenian inventor is undeniable.
Invention and developing the field of plastic surgery was a real revolution in the sphere of modern medicine. His invention of removing facial deformations was a booming event which marked the beginning of the new era of plastic surgery.
Varazdat Kazanjian was honored during his lifetime. Living in Ottoman Armenia, Varazdat managed to escape Hamidian Massacres and arrive to United States as a refugee. He started his education at Harvard Dental School and appeared to be a rather successful maxillofacial surgeon.
However, the fame of this Armenian inventor and great doctor especially raised during the World War I. During this period, he treated more than 3000 patients with different facial injuries. His efforts didn’t leave the world indifferent.
This amazing inventor has published over 150 articles throughout his career. In the articles, you can meet the long list of his patients and the descriptions of their treatment.
Thanks to his talent and the ability to think outside the box, he gained many nicknames. One of the best remembered ones is “magician” called by Sigmund Freud.
Michel Ter-Pogossian
Michel Matthew Ter-Pogossian (April 21, 1925 – June 19, 1996) was an Armenian-American nuclear physicist who is one of the fathers of positron emission tomography (PET), the first functional brain imaging technology. PET could effectively be used to evaluate what areas of the brain were active during various mental processes versus looking at the structure of the brain through conventional CT.
Ter-Pogossian was born in Berlin, the only child of Armenian parents who had settled in Germany after escaping the Armenian Genocide during World War I. The family moved to France when Michel was a young child. During World War II, he fought with the French resistance. He earned degrees in science from the University of Paris and from the Institute of Radium. In 1946, he emigrated to the United States to attend Washington University of St. Louis; he later joined the faculty of Washington University School of Medicine. He was married in 1966 to Ann Scott Dodson and had three children and six grandchildren.
PET scanning is one of the most promising techniques for cancer detection and has applications in monitoring heart disease.The development of new radioligands may allow more uses of positron emission tomography for other areas in medicine.
The technique uses the injection of ultrashort acting radioactive substances commonly bound to water or deoxyglucose. The deoxyglucose method directly measures brain metabolism whereas the radioactively labeled water is effective at measuring brain blood flow.
Raymond Vahan Damadian
Damadian (born March 16, 1936, NY USA) is an Armenian-American medical practitioner and inventor of the first MR (Magnetic Resonance) Scanning Machine. His research into sodium and potassium in living cells led him to his first experiments with nuclear magnetic resonance (NMR) which caused him to first propose the MR body scanner in 1969.
Damadian discovered that tumors and normal tissue can be distinguished in vivo by nuclear magnetic resonance (NMR) because of their relaxation times. Damadian was the first to perform a full body scan of a human being in 1977 to diagnose cancer. Damadian invented an apparatus and method to use NMR safely and accurately to scan the human body, a method now well known as magnetic resonance imaging (MRI)
Hrayr Shahinian
Dr. Hrayr K. Shahinian, M.D. is regarded as a pioneer in the field of medicine for his revolutionary use of minimally invasive endoscopy in performing skull base surgery. He is leading a paradigm shift by shunning the traditional craniotomy — a relatively barbaric procedure that involves making an incision from ear to ear, pulling back the skin to expose the skull, sawing off the top portion to reach the brain and attempting to correct the abnormality in question — in favor of the state-of-the-art procedure. Shahinian, who leads a world-class team of specialists at the Skull Base Institute in Los Angeles, is breaking new ground by treating his patients using micro-instruments to access the problem areas. By utilizing this revolutionary technology, along with fiber optic, high-definition video that enables him to have a panoramic view of the interior anatomy of the skull, he skillfully removes tumors and repairs vascular problems while, at the same time, dramatically reducing operating and recovery times.
Dr. Hrayr Shahinian was born in Beirut, Lebanon, and spent his formative years in Paris. One of his favorite pursuits was traveling throughout the Middle East and Africa with his father as he worked on various civil engineering projects. During this time, his father influenced him tremendously, encouraging him to actively pursue academic excellence while providing a steady stream of inspiration as the youngster achieved various goals.
It was in his home city that Dr. Hrayr Shahinian began his quest for a career in medicine, first earning a bachelor’s degree in biology/chemistry from the American University of Beirut before earning medical degrees from that institution and Pritzker Medical School at the University of Chicago. While there, he earned a distinguished membership in the prestigious Alpha Omega Alpha honor society for excellence in the medical community. He later relocated to Illinois to serve as a research associate at the University of Chicago’s Department of Surgery before completing his training in general surgery at Vanderbilt University in Tennessee.
Shahinian later completed fellowships in three different specialty areas, starting with plastic/reconstructive surgery and craniofacial surgery at New York University Medical Center’s Institute of Reconstructive Plastic Surgery before moving to Switzerland to concentrate on skull base surgery at the University of Zurich’s Department of Head and Neck Surgery. After returning to the United States, Shahinian accepted a position as an attending surgeon at the United States Department of Veterans Affairs Medical Center in Northport, N.Y. He later went on to serve as an assistant clinical professor at the Institute of Reconstructive Plastic Surgery at New York University Medical Center and assistant professor of surgery and neurosurgery at the State University of New York at Stony Brook. He later accepted a position at that institution to serve as co-director of the Skull Base Institute. He relocated to Los Angeles in 1996 to accept a position at Cedars-Sinai Medical Center and reestablish the Skull Base Institute, which, over the next several years, assembled a top-ranked team of surgeons, endocrinologists, radiologists and other specialty personnel before the facility expanded in 2003.
A fellow of the American College of Surgeons, Shahinian has received scores of awards including the Harwell Wilson Award for Excellence as a surgical resident from Vanderbilt University Medical Center as well as several teaching awards at various institutions. He has authored numerous journal articles as well as chapters in such noted textbooks as “Grabb and Smith’s Plastic Surgery” and “Endocrinology.”
John Najarian
John S. Najarian (born December 22, 1927) is a transplant surgeon and is Clinical Professor of Transplant Surgery at the University of Minnesota.
Over the past three decades he has performed countless organ transplants, first at the University of San Francisco and most recently as chief of surgery at the University of Minnesota. In doing so he has almost single-handedly developed the practice of organ transplantation into what could be considered a routine procedure. His collegues in academia revere him: “a giant of 20th century medicine.” He was charged with with illegally marketing an experimental drug but was cleaned of the charges. Najarian was exonerated in the eyes of the law, but professionally he was wounded.
“We were the first to do pancreas transplants, first to do kidney transplants in diabetic patients … first successful liver transplant, trained all the individuals who did the first heart patients, did the first successful bone marrow transplants,” he says.
“To this day I can’t walk down the street and people don’t come up and shake my hand. It’s the most amazing thing in the world,” he says.
