Portrait of John Gibbon. | Photo Credit: Wikimedia Commons If we were to look at the history of cardiac surgery, the invention of the heart-lung machine is one of the most significant milestones. For, these machines temporarily replace the function of the heart and lungs during those procedures. Join A.S.Ganesh as he takes a look at the life of John Gibbon, the man who developed a heart-lung machine and used it successfully to perform the first open-heart operation... The distressing stories of people gasping for breath, not finding oxygen cylinders when they need them has become a recurrent theme during the ongoing COVID-19 pandemic. The function of oxygen in our healthy living can’t be stressed enough and times such as these offer us a stark reminder.