When a Mayo Clinic surgeon showed a short film featuring the drummer of the heavy metal band Extractus at the Minneapolis Convention Center last week, he probably wasn't hitting the band's target audience.
They were suit-clad doctors, in town for the annual convention of the American Association for Thoracic Surgery. They seemed pretty button-down for the drummer's exuberant style, but they were impressed nonetheless.
That's because the drummer, 22-year-old Justin Vigile, had been bedridden and dying with end-stage heart disease, hypertrophic cardiomyopathy, or thickening of the heart muscle, just months before the video was shot.
The Mayo surgeon, Dr. Hartzell Schaff, played the video as part of his swan song as president of the association. But he didn't do it to show off his pioneering surgery. Schaff was trying to highlight the importance of the unforeseen benefits of research, sometimes realized decades later.
It's exactly the kind of research in National Institutes of Health labs around the country that is in jeopardy because our representatives in Washington don't have the courage to come to consensus on the national budget, and thus have relied on sequestration that slashes money across the board. That includes $20 million in research at Mayo Clinic alone.
If you are one of the people who thinks sequestration isn't having an impact on anyone, listen to Vigile:
"Everybody likes to say I'm a miracle," said Vigile. "But I tell them it's science, man. I'm alive because of science, years and years of hard science, and somebody's got to pay for that."
Schaff was working as an intern in Baltimore on "something completely unrelated to HCM" with another patient's case. Doctors had thought the patient's heart was stiffening. Instead, the problem was his ventricle was too small.
