Noah was just six years old when he walked up behind someone mowing the lawn who didn’t know he was there. In an instant, as the lawnmower was backed up, Noah’s foot was caught underneath it, sharp blades cutting through skin, muscle and bone in his foot and toes. “They told us at the hospital that his foot might have to be amputated,” says Hingst. “We were in total shock.”

The beeping vibrato of pressure monitors, mechanical rhythm of the blood pump, low hum of the oxygenator and metronomic beat measuring heart rate: These are the sounds that emanate from a complex circuit of pumps, tubes, filters and monitors called ECMO, or extracorporeal membrane oxygenation. ECMO moves blood outside of the body through cannulae, or tubes, to an oxygenator that provides a gas exchange in the blood, removing carbon dioxide and replacing it with oxygen. The oxygenated blood is then warmed to the appropriate temperature and returned to the body using rhythms that mimic a beating heart.

When disease or trauma prevent the body from performing these life-sustaining rhythms, ECMO can take over.

Three billion is such a large number that it’s hard to fathom. To put it in perspective:

• 3 billion seconds is about 95 years
• If you took 3 billion steps, you could walk around Earth at its equator more than 45 times
• Stacking 3 billion pennies would result in a tower nearly 3,000 miles tall

Three billion also happens to be the number of DNA building blocks, or base pairs, that make up a human genome. And nearly every single cell in our bodies contains two copies of those 3 billion base pairs.

Functional neurosurgery—surgical interaction with the brain to improve function—was pioneered to treat people in need of pain relief, often those suffering with terminal cancer. Simple early procedures included surgically creating tiny lesions, also called ablations, in specific areas of the nervous system linked to pain.

The field has come a long way since those early days, says Jon Willie, MD, PhD, Washington University neurosurgeon at Barnes-Jewish Hospital.