William P. Murphy Jr.

While at Cordis, Murphy found it difficult to obtain the appropriate quantities and types of materials needed to complete his prototypes. To overcome this, he started Small Parts, Inc., a Miami, FL-based company that provides materials and tools to engineers—in any amount—to help facilitate completion of projects. The company, well known throughout the medical and engineering communities, is one of several companies founded by Murphy and among 30 companies that emerged from Cordis. In 1986, Murphy, together with colleague John Sterner, purchased Hyperion, Inc. Also based in Miami, Hyperion designs, manufactures and markets medical laboratory diagnostic devices.

Murphy's physiologic cardiac pacemaker—which is used to treat heart block—senses what a patient's heart needs and provides suitable stimulation so that the heart can function normally. As more doctors began to use implantable pacemakers, it became clear that there needed to be a way to alter the function of the pacemakers while they were implanted. This led Murphy and his team to develop pacemakers that could be programmed externally and, ultimately, to develop the first DDD (dual chamber demand) pacemaker (1980s).

In 1957, he founded his first company, Medical Development Corporation. The company, which focused on building research instruments, eventually grew into Cordis Corporation, and is now a Johnson & Johnson company. Cordis gave Murphy the resources to create a number of today's standard medical devices, including the first physiologic cardiac pacemaker; the widely used hollow fiber artificial kidney; the first disposable medical procedural trays; the first motor-driven angiographic injectors; and the first disposable catheters.

Murphy's next contribution to the medical world coincided with the Korean War. The U.S. Army first came to Murphy while he was working with a team of doctors in Boston on the first dialysis machines, a program the Army supported because of concerns over exposure to radiation from the Atomic bomb. An offshoot of this work was the refinement of flexible bags to contain blood during transfusions, which offered many advantages to previously used bottles. Developed with Carl Walter, the bags preserve red blood cells and proteins and ensure that the contents are not exposed to air. In 1952, Murphy joined the U.S. Public Health Service as a blood transfusion consultant, and went to Korea to perform transfusions on soldiers injured in battle.

Murphy holds 17 U.S. patents issued between 1952 and 1980.

Murphy graduated from Harvard University in 1946 with a major in pre-medicine and a minor in architecture. He received his M.D. in 1947 from the University of Illinois and also studied physiologic instrumentation at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology from 1947 to 1948.

William P. Murphy Jr. (born November 11, 1923) is a medical doctor and inventor of medical devices including collaborating on a flexible sealed blood bag used for blood transfusions. He is the son of the American physician William Parry Murphy who shared the Nobel Prize in Physiology for Medicine in 1934, and Harriett Adams, the first licensed female dentist in Massachusetts.