Dr. Earl Wood, who helped invent the G-Suit, gets his historical due in a new book

Oct. 2—ROCHESTER — There are no buildings named after Dr. Earl H. Wood. Neither was he awarded a Nobel Prize in his lifetime. But an argument can be made that Wood belongs in the pantheon of all-time great Mayo Clinic figures.

In the 1940s, the Mayo Clinic physiologist led a team that

invented the G-suit,

at the time a revolutionary pressurized garment which helps pilots avoid blacking out while in flight. His work helped pave the way for cardiac catheterization. He received a patent for an oximeter, a diagnostic tool used in all hospitals today to measure oxygen levels in the bloodstream.

"He wasn't one for getting higher in the echelon of the Mayo administration," said Andrew Wood, Wood's son and the author of a new book about Earl Wood. "His main interest was measuring the cardiopulmonary system, how it adapts to stress and how you can relate that to clinic medicine."

"Life at High G-Force: The Quest of Mayo Clinic Researcher Dr. Earl Wood" paints a picture of Wood as not just a distant observer but an active, down-and-dirty participant in experiments involving a centrifuge. As the machine whirled, Wood sat in the basket of the centrifuge, submitting to G-forces that caused black-out sometimes while team members measured his blood pressures at the head and heart levels.

Earl Wood figured he experienced lost consciousness for a total of 15 minutes during the hundreds of rides on the centrifuge, but he was never the worse for wear.

The suit was issued by combat pilots in 1944. By the late 1940s, with the introduction of jet aircraft, G-suits based on the Mayo pattern came into general use and remain standard today.

Wood died on March 18, 2009 at 97.

Published by Mayo Clinic Press, the book was released Tuesday, Sept. 27, 2023. We asked the Rochester author six questions about Earl Wood.

POST BULLETIN: Why did you decide to write this book about your dad?

ANDREW WOOD: Two reasons. One is Earl's story needed to be told about his contribution to aviation science. The other thing — he's not given much credit for it today — one of the biggest contributions to medicine is the pulse oximeter. Every emergency room and operating room in the world has a pulse oximeter, which measures the oxygen saturation in your blood. When you get into an ER, they clip a little instrument on your finger and it gives you an immediate readout of the percentage oxygen saturation in your blood. That came right off the

centrifuge experiment during World War II.

You say that Earl Wood was not really a big fan of science fiction movies. With the release of "Top Gun: Maverick" last year, more attention was given to G-suits. Why was Earl such a critic of the science fiction genre?

Let's go back to the first "Top Gun" movie with Tom Cruise. I sat with him through the movie, and, pardon the expression, but he'd be watching it and all of a sudden, he'd say, "b—sh—." All these curves and you wouldn't see the effects of even the lateral G's or the vertical G's. He did not experience the same thing in combat aircraft, and that was 40 years prior to the first "Top Gun."

Yet a movie called "Dive Bomber" did have a big impact on Earl Wood's career and his decision to work at Mayo Clinic. It was released in 1941 and stars Errol Flynn and Fred MacMurray. (The near-documentary style film is an American aviation film that delves into aeromedical research and contemporary medical equipment.)

My father was working in pharmacology at Harvard at the time. And Mayo offered him a job. He turned down the job. "I'm pretty satisfied doing pharmacology research at Harvard," he said. Well, fast forward a couple of weeks. He went out on a date with my mother. And he saw the movie "Dive Bomber." He looks at this suit (in the movie) and says, "We can do more." The movie had a huge role because the next day he resigned from Harvard, accepted a job at Mayo and the rest is history.

One thing your book makes clear is that Earl Wood was a pretty humble guy. Yet if he were alive today where we monetize almost everything, it's easy to imagine how his inventive mind would have made him a very rich man.

The patents basically went to Mayo. Here's the thing. He wasn't about profit share. He wasn't about market share. He wasn't about the bottom line. He was in it for the quest for knowledge. He was very data-centric and how to properly analyze that data and how we can make progress through science. And so this is what made him extremely unique.

Here's a question I think your dad may not have liked. Do you believe he belongs in the top echelon of Mayo historical figures?

I think he's up there with Henry Plummer (one of Mayo's founders). And he's up there with Edward Kendall and Philip Hench, who are Nobel Prize laureates. There's no question that he's one of the top researchers that ever came out of Mayo.

What happened to the centrifuge?

It was located in the Mayo Medical Sciences Building and it was used until 1972. It was fully functional. Mayo got involved with computer X-ray, in the development of what is called DSR, spatial dynamic reconstructor. This is sort of a predecessor of the MRI scans and the CAT scans of the day. This was a huge development that they were able to get a $5.2 million grant from NIH to produce this new scanning tool.

So the debate started where to put this thing and the suggestion was made to remove the centrifuge and put the dynamic spatial reconstructor in its place. I'll tell you, this broke my father's heart. The unfortunate thing is, they hauled it out on a semi-trailer and put it in storage. My father was calling the Smithsonian and the Air Force Museum and so forth. He thought it should be preserved and belonged in a museum. Sometime later, a museum finally called and said, "Yeah, we're interested." They called the warehouse and they had cut it up for scrap.