King of hearts

Where the hardware meets the human: One inventor’s joyful dance at the edge of death

By Erica Ryberg

The South County Spotlight, Sep 2, 2009, Updated Oct 30, 2009

INNOVATION STATION - Stephen Topaz poses at his microscope with his "Plug and Play" device, which he designed for use in emergency rooms.

Erica Ryberg / South County Spotlight

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When Stephen Topaz retired to St. Helens several years ago, he wasn’t looking for a bungalow, but rather a large space with 3-phase power that could hold and run a lifetime’s worth of laboratory and design tools.

The equipment came from a laboratory he shared for years with Willem Kolff, the scientist well known for inventing the artificial kidney and pioneering the design of the first artificial heart approved by the Food and Drug Administration.

Topaz, in short, wasn’t planning to enjoy a typical retirement.

“He’s been in heaven the last five or six years because he’s never been busier,” said his daughter, Kat Topaz.

In downtown St. Helens, the jocular 71-year-old engineer spends his days inventing devices to pump blood in dying people, jostle the limbs of neurologically compromised patients and even carry paralyzed athletes down ski-hills.

“Gravity is gravity,” he’s fond of saying. It doesn’t matter whether you’re inside a body or outside. The physical laws that govern design are the same.

And the man who graduated with a mechanical engineering degree in 1961 has spent most of his career among research scientists and medical doctors working with those laws to design life-saving devices of all varieties. As an instructor of surgery, that work was often hands on.

“I’m a mechanical engineer. Blood is the same as petroleum oil going through a pipe,” Topaz said of his calling.

You want to learn about patience? asked Topaz. Try working for 48 hours to keep someone alive. Now that’s patience.

“Scientists think about pieces,” said John Watson, Topaz’s colleague who works as a bioengineering professor at University of California San Diego. “But the little pieces won’t work without the rest of it. That’s what Steve is good at – putting it all together.”

Topaz is a small man with a quick wit and bright eyes, the color of which exactly match his surname. He moves fleetly from project to project through a building that houses a cluttered lab on one side and a cluttered house and fertile kitchen on the other. On Saturdays, said Kat, he bakes. On the other days, what he’s up to is anyone’s bet — it could be anything from hearts to kayaks to plastic pillows for chiropractors.

During his years in labs, hospitals and cardiac operating rooms around the country, he rarely knew the people whose lives his inventions saved. Now, he designs for friends and acquaintances. And in 2007, one of his designs saved the life of his granddaughter.

“It’s funny when I’m in a hospital I look at certain devices,” Kat said. “I look at them and say ‘Oh, my dad did that and that and that.’”

One of those devices was vital when she went to the hospital with a difficult and at-risk pregnancy. The fetal heart monitor clinicians strapped across her belly to monitor her baby’s heart rate was another of her father’s inventions.

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