Robert (Bob) Bartlett (born May 8, 1939) is an American physician and medical researcher who is credited with developing a lifesaving heart-lung technology known as extracorporeal membrane oxygenation (ECMO). He is an emeritus professor of surgery at the University of Michigan Medical School. Career Bartlett graduated from Albion College and the University of Michigan Medical School. After completing general surgery and thoracic surgery training at Brigham and Children's hospitals in Boston, Bartlett spent ten years on the faculty of the University of California, Irvine School of Medicine. Through laboratory research that began in the 1960s, Bartlett helped to develop ECMO technology for babies with potentially reversible heart or lung dysfunction. Bartlett reported the first neonatal survivor of ECMO, referred to as Baby Esperanza, in 1976. Baby Esperanza suffered lung damage from meconium aspiration syndrome and she was so sick that ECMO was applied as a last-ditch effort to save her life. The baby spent three days on Bartlett's machine and she recovered. In 1980, Bartlett came back to the University of Michigan and joined the faculty. He spent 25 years as the director of Michigan's surgical intensive care unit. He held positions as Chief of General Surgery, program director of the Surgical Critical Care fellowship, and director of the extracorporeal life support laboratory and clinical service. He helped to start a breast care center affiliated with the university health system in 1984. He established the Extracorporeal Life Support Organization in 1989. He retired from the operating room in 2005 and directs the extracorporeal life support laboratory. The University of Michigan Medical School established the Robert Bartlett Professorship in Pediatric Surgery. Bartlett began to write fiction late in his medical career. He became interested in writing stories about medicine and the law after testifying as an expert on burns in the appeal of a man's conviction for child abuse. Though Bartlett was convinced that the defendant was innocent, the man's conviction was not overturned. Bartlett began to write fiction based in part on his experience with burn patients. His first novel was published in 2005. His second novel is Piece of Mind, a novel of medicine and philosophy which explores the mind/body question from the point of view of a neurosurgeon and his patients. Bartlett's research has been continuously funded by NIH since 1971. In addition to ECMO he made major contributions to critical care physiology, acute kidney injury and continuous