As a surgical resident at Johns Hopkins in the 1960s, David Goldfarb was fascinated by cardiovascular surgery, a field then in its early stages. While training under his mentor, Henry Bahnson, he became interested in developing artificial vascular grafts.
Goldfarb moved to Phoenix in 1973 to establish a pediatric heart surgery practice at the Arizona Heart Center but continued his research at Arizona State University. Shortly after relocating, he developed a breakthrough artificial blood vessel using a material called expanded polytetrafluoroethylene (known as PTFE), still one of the most widely used grafts in vascular surgeries. He filed a patent in 1974 after learning that the material’s manufacturer filed its own patent listing one of its employees as the graft’s inventor. Thus began a nearly 40-year court battle, which finally ended in 2013 as C.R. Bard, a medical device company that Goldfarb licensed his patent to, received a settlement of nearly $1 billion.
As tribute to Goldfarb, who earned his undergraduate degree in arts and sciences from Johns Hopkins in 1959 and his medical degree in 1963, C.R. Bard donated $2.5 million to Johns Hopkins Medicine to establish an endowed professorship in his name. The professorship was dedicated on Nov. 10, 2014, and James Black, chief of vascular surgery and endovascular therapy at The Johns Hopkins Hospital and regional director for vascular surgery across Johns Hopkins Medical Institutions, was the inaugural recipient.
Black, who has been at Johns Hopkins for nearly 20 years, has an international reputation as an aortic surgeon with expertise in the most challenging open and endovascular aortic operations to address thoracoabdominal aortic aneurysms. He also pursues the application of minimally invasive catheter-based technologies for patients with aortic dissection and diseases of the renal, mesenteric and lower extremity arteries.
“This honor is humbling and inspiring,” Black said during the dedication ceremony. “Inspiring in the sense the lifetime of work in materials by Dr. Goldfarb and his colleagues at C.R. Bard could manifest in such an enduring way today. It is equally humbling the same lifetime of work has produced a lifesaving and ubiquitous item for medical care. Perhaps, in a small way, I am now tied to this great medical legacy.”
Although Goldfarb was too ill to attend the dedication ceremony, his wife, Joan, spoke on his behalf. “He is a very nice man with very nice memories,” says Black, who traveled to meet Goldfarb a few months ago. “He saw the good in everyone who had trained him and thought the world of his education.”
By setting up this endowed professorship, “we hope to give Dr. Black and others the same freedom to make important discoveries that Dr. Goldfarb enjoyed when he was studying an exotic new material and methodically determined how it could best be configured for use as a vascular graft,” says Timothy Ring, C.R. Bard’s chairman and CEO. “Dr. Black can take inspiration from the knowledge that he has the resources to pursue life-changing ideas wherever they may lead.”