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66 The PCB Magazine • November 2014 Gray mcQuarrie is chief technol- ogy officer for hei inc. to contact mcQuarrie, or to read past col- umns, click here. stress it enough how important it is to stop with the whys, stop with knee jerk solutions, and spend time collecting all of the facts. If the facts going into the mastermind are junk, the solution will be junk too. Another rule of the mastermind is to in- clude supplier and vendor experts as full partici- pating members of the mastermind. Too many engineers don't listen to their suppliers. This is an extremely arrogant thing to do and it often makes for stupid decisions that compound the problem. The wider the net you make the mas- termind, the greater the intelligence of the mas- termind. In other words, including operators, supervisors, managers, and other people who may know little about what we do is a very wise thing to do. Finally, the last rule I want to mention is to ban any discussion about the past, other than documented facts. We have all been in meetings where this was heard: We tried this before and it didn't work. Our memories are extremely terri- ble. Watch this YouTube video where psycholo- gist Elizabeth Loftus talks about false memories. One of the more provocative things she says is this: "Our memories are constructive. They are reconstructive. Memory works more like a Wiki- pedia page. You can go in there and change it. But so can other people." For the astute reader, you may have noticed that I am now in the line of fire. I am no longer looking at things from the outside, but like you I am on the inside trying to make a difference in our industry. After all, the solution to all of our DAM problems is inside of our four walls. PCB from joint replacements to cardiac implants and dialysis machines, medical devices enhance or save lives on a daily basis. however, any de- vice implanted in the body or in contact with flowing blood faces two critical challenges that can threaten the life of the patient the device is meant to help: blood clotting and bacterial in- fection. a team of harvard scientists and engineers may have a solution. they developed a new surface coating for medi- cal devices using materi- als already approved by the fda. the coating re- pelled blood from more than 20 medically rele- vant substrates the team tested—made of plastic, glass, and metal—and also suppressed biofilm formation in a study reported in nature biotech- nology. the team implanted medical-grade tubing and catheters coated with the material in large blood vessels in pigs, and it prevented blood from clotting for at least eight hours without the use of blood thinners such as heparin, which is notorious for causing potentially lethal side-ef- fects like excessive bleeding, yet often a neces- sary evil in medical treatments where clotting is a risk. "devising a way to prevent blood clotting without using anticoagulants is one of the holy grails in medicine," said senior author donald ingber, the Judah folkman Professor of vascular biology at harvard medical school and boston Chil- dren's hospital, Professor of bioengineering at harvard school of engineering and applied sciences (seas), and founding director of harvard's wyss institute for biologically inspired engi- neering. Bioinspired Coating for Medical Devices Repels Blood, Bacteria SOLvING A TRuE DAM PROBLEM continues