"I just had a natural inclination and inquisitive nature about building things," Fogarty says. "I looked at things and just naturally thought, 'Okay, how can I make this better?'" As a scrub tech, Fogarty noticed the difficulty surgeons had removing a blood clot, a 9- to 12-hour operation that often resulted in amputations or death. A solution "just came to me," the inventor and surgeon recalls. Using the fly-tying skills he had honed as a fisherman, he tied the tip of a latex glove to a catheter, which could be inflated to "drag" a clot out of the body. "I'd always tied flies and made lures and that kind of stuff. It was just a natural thing."