Part 2
An influx of attention and research on prevention and treatment of RDS came in the 1960s and 1970s, particularly following death of President John F. Kennedy’s son, Patrick, from RDS in 1963. In the 1970s, Avery presented her surfactant research to a group of pulmonary researchers in San Francisco. Soon after, she met Tetsuro Fujiwara, a pediatrician from Japan, who had spent years reproducing and building upon Avery’s work. Fujiwara invited Avery to his lab in Japan, where they were developing a replacement surfactant treatment for RDS using modified sheep’s lung surfactant, which could be instilled in the lungs of infants. The first ten babies they treated all improved dramatically within hours, and eight ultimately survived. Avery later called this “the absolutely definitive experiment.” She returned home and helped organize the first clinical trials in the United States using Fujiwara’s surfactant, which she called “Fujisurf.”
