The Future of Surgery

Even at an institution like Stanford, there are patients we cannot yet help. Their faces linger longest. And, ultimately, it is those faces that drive us to invent the future of surgery.

There is no clear path to that future. Driven by our patients' needs, we imagine solutions. We weigh options. We devote resources. We collaborate across this campus and with our surrounding community. We go down blind alleyways. We shift direction.

Ultimately, we discover new approaches that can save lives.

It's not enough, however, to discover and develop surgical innovations. Both the present and the future demand that we place equal emphasis on practice, on bringing innovation homegrown or not - to our patients. Moreover, we must instill this process of bedside to bench and back again in our students, for they will comprise the next generation of surgical leaders.

Today, we are world leaders in a range of innovative surgical techniques. In the next years, we hope to realize our goal of creating chips made of biomaterials that can encourage cell growth and survival. Or maybe we will replicate in humans our successes with regenerating bone and tissue in mice.

We don't know, exactly, what the future of surgery brings.

We do know that it gets closer every day.