Artificial hearts are amazing, but flawed. They wear out quickly and, even today, they don't work at all unless the transplantee is hooked up to an external air compressor 24-7. That doesn't make for a great quality of life. In fact, according to a story in Popular Science, written by Dan Baum, the first man to ever use an artificial heart asked his doctors (repeatedly) if they couldn't just let him die.
And yet, many people would still like to avoid dying of heart failure. So how do you solve the problem?
As Baum explains it, the flaws in artificial hearts are all tied back to a key issue: Trying to make them beat like a natural heart. So, what if an artificial heart didn't have to beat in order to do its job?
Meeko the calf stood nuzzling a pile of hay. He didn’t seem to have much appetite, and he looked a little bored. Every now and then, he glanced up, as though wondering why so many people with clipboards were standing around watching him.
Fourteen hours earlier, I’d watched doctors lift Meeko’s heart from his body and place it, still beating, in a plastic dish. He looked no worse for the experience, whisking away a fly with his tail as he nibbled, demonstrably alive—though above his head, a monitor showed a flatlined pulse. I held a stethoscope to his warm, fragrant flank and heard, instead of the deep lub-dub of a heartbeat, what sounded like a dentist’s drill or the underwater whine of an outboard motor. Something was keeping Meeko alive, but it was nothing like a heart.
This is a longer read, but very much worthwhile. It's one of those stories that will leave you feeling like you live in the capital-F Future.
Read the rest of Dan Baum's Popular Science story on a new kind of artificial heart.
Image: Green Heart (And the Green Grass Grows All Around, All Around), a Creative Commons Attribution (2.0) image from carbonnyc's photostream
