Back in the 1970s, Delos “Toby” Cosgrove, a heart surgeon, was feeling frustrated. At that time, the field of open heart surgery was still in its infancy, and surgeons used a rigid ring to help restore the shape of a heart valve after surgery. Unfortunately, this ring did not work particularly well because it was too rigid to move with the human tissue. And although specialist medical labs and surgeons in operating theatres had sought to develop a better solution, nobody had found one that worked.
Then, some years later, Cosgrove happened to spot a kind of flexible hoop that 19th-century American women used for embroidering pieces of cloth. That’s when he had his “aha!” moment: why not utilise the sewing device and apply it to human hearts to create a valve that could move with human tissue?
“Heart surgery and embroidery don’t usually appear in the same sentence,” admits Cosgrove, who now runs the Cleveland Clinic in Ohio. But the idea worked so well that it quickly became the dominant method in coronary care, and Cosgrove himself has since filed 30 patents for similarly unusual inventions.