He also worked as a cardiothoracic surgery researcher at the UCLA School of Medicine,[3] co-authoring more than 20 papers from the laboratory of Dr. Gerald Buckberg.
[5] He is most famous for developing with Mike Darwin a blood substitute shown capable of sustaining life in dogs for four hours at near-freezing temperatures.
Cryovita was a for-profit organization which provided cryopreservation services and the building for Alcor in the 1980s, including storage of the first cryonics patient, James Bedford, from 1982.
Together, Leaf and Darwin developed a standby-transport model for human cryonics cases with the goal of intervening immediately after cardiac arrest and minimizing ischemic injury, the "gold standard" of technology at that time, in which a patient's kidney was considered to be in transplantable condition two days after his or her death.
[10] Leaf and Darwin transferred Bedford, the first person cryopreserved, to a more technologically advanced Cryogenic storage dewar at Alcor in 1991, and were able to examine him at that time.