designed. Following World War II, Wood was recruited to participate in what was known as "Operation Paperclip" The goal was to keep the top German scientists away from Russia and working for the United States. In 1962, Wood was the tenth scientist to be named "Career Investigator," of the American Heart Association. These funds allowed Wood considerable flexibility in regards to the directions of his research. Other work After his work on the G-Suit, Wood worked on techniques for measuring cardiac blood flow. He was granted a patent for the ear oximeter, an optical instrument that measures blood oxygen levels without taking blood by examining the variation of light absorption as a function of oxygen saturation of hemoglobin. Integral to the work leading to the development of the G suit was the perfection of vascular catheterization methods needed to understand the distribution of blood pressure and flow. Shortly after the end of World War II, open-heart surgery emerged with the Mayo contribution to the development of the heart-lung bypass machine initially developed by Gibbons and perfected by Wood and colleagues. Wood's work at the Mayo Clinic lead to the development of many technologies allowing for the assessment of the heart and lungs including dye dilution methods serving to characterize cardiac output, methods for the assessment of central blood volume, the calculation of pulmonary vascular resistance (known as the "Wood Unit" and calculated by subtracting pulmonary capillary wedge pressure from the mean pulmonary arterial pressure and dividing by the cardiac output), analog subtraction angiography, and eventually the Dynamic Spatial Reconstructor (DSR), a predecessor to modern high speed volumetric computed tomography (CT) allowing for the evaluation of the beating heart and breathing lungs. The DSR comprised 14 X-ray tubes and a hemicylindrical fluorescent screen imaged by 14 associated television cameras. In all, Wood is noted for his contributions (together with members of the Biodynamics Research Unit (BRU), under his direction, within the Physiology and Biophysics Department at the Mayo Clinic) in the following areas: methods for protection against blackout and unconsciousness during high G-forces methods for heart catheterizations; methods for monitoring vascular pressures; the pulse oximeter for real time non-invasive monitoring or arterial oxygen saturation; methods for calculation of pulmonary vascular resistance (Wood Unit); methods for the digital conversion of analog physiologic signals allowing for computer-based monitoring of vascular signals (using the early computer developments of IBM which was just down the