The latest innovation from biomedical scientists trying to create the perfect artificial heart is a fully functional one that doesn’t beat.
Dr. Billy Cohn and Dr. Bud Frazier from the Texas Heart Institute have developed a machine that pumps blood through the body by using two centrifugal pumps, thus replacing the primordial sound of a beating heart with a quiet hum.
They’ve tested the device on 38 calves and one human patient and say it hasn’t had a single failure, but that it still needs more work.
Inside the institute’s animal research laboratory is an 8-month-old calf with a soft brown coat named Abigail. Cohn and Frazier removed Abigail’s heart and replaced it with two centrifugal pumps.
“If you listened to her chest with a stethoscope, you wouldn’t hear a heartbeat,” says Cohn. “If you examined her arteries, there’s no pulse. If you hooked her up to an EKG, she’d be flat-lined.”
The pumps spin Abigail’s blood and move it through her body.
“By every metric we have to analyze patients, she’s not living,” Cohn says. “But here you can see she’s a vigorous, happy, playful calf licking my hand.”
News like this reminds me of how incredible the times that we live in are. The future is now.
