Two Mayo Clinic doctors were among three people awarded the Nobel Prize in medicine in 1950 for the discovery of cortisone. Professor Edward C. Kendall, PhD, and Dr. Philip S. Hench of Mayo Clinic were jointly awarded the Nobel Prize in medicine alongside Dr. Tadeus Reichstein, a Swiss chemist who conducted independent research, for the discovery. They separated and identified compounds from the adrenal cortex that produced cortisone and hydrocortisone. Later in the decade, Mayo Clinic began using and refining the Gibbon heart-lung machine in cardiac surgery. It is now known as the Mayo-Gibbon heart-lung machine.