The late cardiologist Bernard Lown, MD, created the Lown Institute in 1973, a nonpartisan think tank that advocates for civic leadership and accountability in healthcare.
Four things to know about Dr. Lown:
1. Born in Lithuania in 1921, Dr. Lown emigrated to Maine in 1935.
2. Dr. Lown was expelled from Johns Hopkins School of Medicine in Baltimore in the early 1940s for altering blood-bottle labels that denoted donors' race. The altering was done in an act of protest, according to the American Medical Association. He was reinstated and graduated with a medical degree from Johns Hopkins in 1945.
3. In 1962, Dr. Lown invented the Lown Device, a defibrillator that used direct-current electrical shocks to restore normal heartbeats.
4. Dr. Lown died Feb. 16 at the age of 99.