Banning Gray Lary, an American surgeon and innovator, passed away at his home in South Miami on January 3, 2013 at the age of 88. Born in Winchester, Kentucky, Banning was the son of Virgil Pendleton and Thelma Gray Lary. During Lary’s freshman year at a junior military academy near Cookeville, Tennessee, Japan bombed Pearl Harbor, which led him to enlist in the U.S. Army. His company was sent to fight in North Africa, but he was held back, made a platoon sergeant, and assigned to train the next wave of recruits. At age 18, he was transferred to an Army specialized officer training program at Ohio State University and became a cadet colonel. His acumen for medicine emerged, and he was sent to the University of Illinois to train as an Army doctor. When the war ended, he continued his studies under the G.I. Bill and graduated with a Doctor of Medicine degree in 1948. During his medical school years in Chicago, Lary fell in love with Katherine Lee Tedrow, a lovely young woman from Princeton, Illinois, who attended Northwestern University. They married in 1948 and had four sons, each of whom found success later in their chosen fields. Their youngest son Brett sadly passed away at the age of 22. Lary interned at St. Luke’s Hospital in Chicago, Illinois, where he rotated through the various specialties. It was surgery, however, for which he felt his greatest affection. He was especially entranced with the work and writings of Dr. Warren H. Cole, with whom he spent a year focusing on gallbladder disease research. While in Cole’s laboratory, Lary made a pivotal discovery. Earlier studies had shown that oxygen delivered in large bubbles could be fatal. Working on canine subjects, Lary found a way to make small bubbles using a wetting agent. When those tiny bubbles were introduced into the venous system, they were able to supply life-saving oxygen for the first time without delivering it through the lungs. His work was published in the Surgical Forum and was presented at the 1952 annual meeting of the American College of Surgeons. A few years later, Richard DeWall, a research fellow in the laboratory of Dr. Walton Lillehei, developed the first DeWall–Lillehei bubble oxygenator, which made feasible creation of the heart–lung machine. Their experimental work in 1955 was based on a similar method of passing small oxygen bubbles through a series of small hypodermic needles to allow oxygenation of blood. When the Korean War broke out, Lary was called up from the Air Force Reserves, but St. Luke’s Hospital managed to get him deferred as chief resident. He worked with Drs. Harold Wiggers and Raymond Ingraham, who at that time were researching hemorrhagic shock with Banning Gray Lary (1924-2013)