John Gibbon and His Heart-Lung MachineJohn Heysham Gibbon, Jr., M. D., was the first researcher to develop a heart lung machine that could fully support an adult's cardiac and respiratory functions during surgical procedures to repair defects in the heart and lungs. The difficulty of such a task can be seen in the number of people who attempted it for over a century: the list is long. Gibbon succeeded on May 6, 1953, when he repaired an atrial septal defect with the patient supported