Dan Goods How NASA invented a ventilator for COVID19 ... in 37 days TED
Transcriber:
From NASA’s Jet Propulsion Lab
in Pasadena, California,
right behind me is mission control.
I’m going to let you take a look,
because on February 18th,
we’re going to attempt to land
NASA’s next rover to Mars.
It’s going to be the most sophisticated
rover ever sent to the Red Planet.
It’s even going to have
a helicopter on it.
So JPL is an amazing place,
where people are creating robotic missions
to explore the universe.
They also create satellites
that orbit the Earth
and help us understand
this planet that we live on.
But today, I’m going to talk about
something a little bit closer to home.
It’s going to be about
a team of space engineers
that invented a COVID-19
ventilator in just 37 days.
And it all started when these two people
bumped into each other
at the JPL cafeteria.
It was right before
the very first shutdown
when the pandemic started.
They started to talk about work,
but then they started to talk about
what COVID might do in the United States,
and that there might be
a shortage of ventilators.
And they started to ask the question,
a really powerful, important question:
Is what I’m doing right this moment
the most important thing
that I could be doing?
Well, they went home,
everything got shut down,
but Dave couldn’t get
that question out of his head.
In fact, that weekend,
he assembled a team,
he found some funding,
and on Monday afternoon,
they ended up having a doctor come to JPL
who had been working on
ventilators for decades,
told them all about ventilators –
what worked, what didn’t work,
and what was really specific to COVID-19.
Now, you can imagine that this group
of engineers are asking themselves,
“Are we the right people
to be making ventilators?”
Well, after talking with the doctor more,
they started to realize that yes,
ventilators are things that are sensing
and responding to bodies, human bodies.
In our case, we create instruments
that sense and respond to other bodies,
like Mars or Jupiter.
Ventilators need to be able to work
in really harsh environments.
Well, we create things
that go to outer space.
Ventilators also –
they just have to work,
because if they don’t work,
someone might die.
In our case, we send things
to other planets,
and when they get there,
we can’t go there and fix them,
so we have a culture of testing
and testing to prove to ourselves
that everything can work
before we send them.
Now, ventilators –
they’re really complicated,
and they are really expensive.
There’s lots of different parts,
and they can do a lot
of different types of things.
So the team decided that
instead of doing a complicated ventilator,
they were going to do something
that was specific just to COVID-19
and that would make it
less expensive, use less parts.
And if a bunch of these
were in the hospital,
the people that have COVID
could be using them,
and we could save the really expensive,
sophisticated ventilators
for those people who really,
really needed them.
And so what they ended up doing
is that they made subcriteria.
And the criteria was: do no harm –
don’t use any ventilator pieces
that are in the supply chain
of current ventilators;
make sure that we use
as few parts as really necessary;
make sure that we can get those parts
anywhere in the world,
because we want people
in lots of different countries
to be able to make these same things;
and then make it easy to use,
because if it’s not easy to use,
people just aren’t going to use it.
Well, I was sitting at home
because I wasn’t part of this project,
and I’m just kind of working from home,
and then I got this really unusual email
by way of Dave Van Buren,
asking me if I’d like to be
a team culturalist.
I had never heard
of a team culturalist before.
I actually lead a team of
artists and designers,
and we help people
think through their thinking.
But I thought, “You know what?
I’m going to do anything to help.
Let me go in and be of help.”
And so this is JPL,
it’s a really big place,
but they only let around
200 people on lab,
and only a few of those were
people working on the ventilator.
But this – this is what I came to
when I first got there.
There’s flashing lights,
handwritten signs all over the place,
a line on the ground
and a sign-up sheet …
It was really strange.
And I realized the people on the project
were in different rooms,
and they couldn’t see each other.
So I scavenged cameras
and computers and cables
from all the computers of people
that are working at home
to be able to set up a system
so everyone could see each other.
And in the process, I realized
that this is a really important moment.
This is really a historically
important moment,
and so I need to be taking pictures
of all these different moments.
And so I was able to get pictures
of all these special moments
when things first started to work,
but also when things didn’t work,
and I was able to send them
to the rest of the team,
because, really, only about 20 percent
of the team was at JPL.
The rest were at home working
and not really feeling connected
to what was going on.
So this was a really great way for them
to feel like they were part of the team.
Now, everything was going super fast.
And, just an example, the chief
engineer said, “Hey,
we need an interface for this ventilator
that’s going to be super easy
for doctors to use.
And could you get it done
by 6am tomorrow?” (Laughs)
And so our team called up a whole bunch
of doctors all over the country at 8pm.
We got together with them,
got done at 10pm,
asking them a bunch of questions.
And literally, a designer ended up
spending all night working on this,
and by 6am, he had an interface done.
Now, this was just par for the course
for what the engineers were going through,
because they were trying to create
something they’d never thought of before.
They were trying to get
all the parts to work,
get the software to work with parts …
But the entire time, we were working
with various doctors.
The person in the middle is Dr. Gurevitch.
He’s the person who first told the team
about what a ventilator was.
The person in the computer next to him,
his name is Dr. Levin.
He’s at Mount Sinai Hospital in New York,
and that was the epicenter
of COVID at the very beginning.
And he would literally
come out of the ICU in his [scrubs]
and get on the webcam and start
to critique what we’re creating.
So, 37 days after they first learned
what a ventilator was,
they stayed up the entire night,
and in the morning,
they had finally finished
their first working prototype
of a ventilator.
They had to hurry up and package it up,
because then they were
going to send it to New York,
to Dr. Levin at Mount Sinai Hospital,
where they tested it
on this human testing case
where they were able to see
whether or not the ventilator worked,
and it worked.
Everyone was super excited,
but they’re even more excited today,
because there are 27 organizations
all around the world
that are creating these things.
They’re in Nigeria, in Brazil,
in India, in dozens of other countries.
And it all started with that simple,
powerful question:
Is what I’m doing right now
the most important thing
I should be doing?