Michael R. Harrison

From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

Michael R. Harrison, M.D. (born May 5, 1943 in Portland, OR) has served as division chief in Pediatric Surgery at the Children’s Hospital at the University of California, San Francisco for over 20 years, where he established the first Fetal Treatment Center in the U.S. He is currently a Professor of Surgery and Pediatrics and the Director of the UCSF Fetal Treatment Center.

He graduated cum laude from Yale University and magna cum laude from Harvard Medical School. He completed his surgical training at the Massachusetts General Hospital in Boston and his pediatric surgery fellowship at Children's Hospital of Los Angeles. He is board certified in Surgery, Pediatric Surgery, and Critical Care. In January 1978, Dr. Harrison accepted a faculty position at UCSF.

Michael R. Harrison is most famous for his work in fetal surgery and other forms of fetal intervention. In 1980, he and his research colleagues developed the techniques for open fetal surgery using animal models. Then in 1981, Dr. Harrison conducted the first open fetal surgery on a fetus to correct a dangerously advanced urinary tract obstruction. Throughout the 1980s and 90s, Dr. Harrison and his associates continued to develop and further refine fetal intervention techniques to treat a range of birth defects and to do so with less invasive means such as fetendo and fetal image-guided surgery.