And yet for 48 hours, in a surgical suite at Northwestern University, a 33-year-old man lived with an empty cavity in his chest where his lungs used to be. The custom hardware solved a physiological puzzle that has made bilateral pneumonectomy, the removal of both lungs, extremely risky before now. The artificial lung system was built by the team of Ankit Bharat, a surgeon and researcher at Northwestern. It successfully kept a critically ill patient alive long enough to enable a double lung transplant, temporarily replacing his entire pulmonary system with a synthetic surrogate. The patient needed a transplant to survive, but he was in refractory septic shock.