Emil Bücherl

Emil Sebastian Bücherl (born November 6, 1919 in Furth im Wald ; † June 28, 2001 in Berlin ) was a German scientist and cardiac surgeon . He is considered a pioneer of German artificial heart research and organ transplantation technology . He was a professor emeritus at the Free University of Berlin .

Life

Buchl grew up in Rosenheim , where he passed the Abitur. Then from 1938 studied medicine in Munich, Rome and Heidelberg. He received his doctorate from the University of Heidelberg in 1944. From 1944 onwards, Bücherl worked at the Marienkrankenhaus in Amberg . In 1955, after studying with American and European cardiac surgeons, he completed his habilitation at the University of Göttingen , where he worked as an assistant at the Surgical Clinic and the Physiological Institute. The subject of his habilitation thesis was "About an artificial heart-lung system".

In 1957 he came to the Westend Clinic of the Free University of Berlin (FU) as a senior physician , became an adjunct professor in 1962 and was acting head of the surgical clinic there until he moved to the Neukölln Municipal Hospital in 1964. In 1969, Bücherl returned to the FU and was given the chair for surgery , where he worked until his retirement in 1988. From 1971 to 1976 he was chairman of the West Berlin section of the Berlin Surgical Society .

The name Emil Bücherl is associated with a large number of first-time operations in the field of transplant medicine and the replacement of human organs : On October 10, 1957, he was the first in Germany to operate on an open heart in the surgical university clinic of the Free University in Berlin, using what was then new developed heart-lung machine . In 1963 he carried out the first kidney transplant , a few years later carried out the first and for a long time only lung transplant (1968) in Germany and, following Christiaan Barnard, carried out one of the first heart transplants worldwide (1969).

An important focus of his research was the development of an artificial heart . In his cardiac surgery research department, which he set up in 1974, he presented a calf to the public in 1976 that had lived with an artificial heart for 120 days. In 1979 the organ, known as the Berlin artificial heart , was implanted in a person and served briefly to support his blood circulation . His invention did not have the purpose of permanently replacing human organs, but was only intended to bridge a patient's waiting time for a donor heart that could be transplanted and thus ensure the survival of the heart patient during this time. In several animal experiments the survival time could be increased with the developed artificial heart. In 1981 a calf survived 268 days after an artificial heart implantation and a goat in 1984 around 345 days. In 1986 he used the further developed and improved Berlin artificial heart on three patients with short or several weeks of success. His research was not only about the artificial heart, but also the artificial windpipe and esophagus . His further development of the implantable pacemaker was also decisive .

Buchl died of the long-term effects of a car accident. For his scientific achievements he was honored with the Berlin Ernst Reuter plaque in 1976 , the Great Cross of Merit of the Federal Republic of Germany in 1984 and the Targa Europea in 1985 . His active research activity is also reflected in the high number of publications - almost 400 publications and monographs . The German Heart Institute Berlin , presented today at the Campus Virchow Clinic of the Charité settled went in 1986 from its 1974 founded "research house" in the Westend Hospital forth. His colleague Roland Hetzer continued his work there as Medical Director until the end of 2014.

The European Society for Artificial Organs awards the Emil-Bücherl-Preis in memory of the life's work of outstanding scientists in the field of artificial organs.

literature

• DE Birnbaum: Milestones in Surgery, Professor Emil Sebastian Bücherl — Pioneer of the Artificial Heart, 6 November 1919–28 June 2001 In: Langenbeck's Archives of Surgery, 2003, Volume 388, Number 3, p. 201-202, doi : 10.1007 / s00423-003-0381-7 PMID 12827363 .
• Emil S. Bücherl , in: Internationales Biographisches Archiv 47/2001 of November 12, 2001, in the Munzinger archive ( beginning of article freely accessible)

Web links

• Literature by and about Emil Bücherl in the catalog of the German National Library
• Obituary for Emil Bücherl in the newspaper of the Free University of Berlin