A heartless human finally gets a pulse

In recent years, modern medicine has provided us with everything from new vaccines to protect us from deadly diseases to groundbreaking cancer treatments. 

It’s provided us with hope on countless occasions — including back in 2011 when doctors unveiled a machine that could allow a human to live without a heart, one of the body’s most important organs. 

After decades of trial and error among surgeons desperately trying to create a machine that wouldn’t break down or cause blood clots and infections, two doctors at the Texas Heart Institute developed a device that used whirling rotors to pump blood around the body without a heartbeat. 

Dr. Billy Cohn and Dr. Buz Frazier first tested the idea in an eight-month-old calf called Abigail, removing her heart and successfully replacing it with two centrifugal pumps, which circulated the blood through her. 

“By every metric, we have to analyse patients, she’s not living,” Cohn told NPR. 

“But here you can see she’s a vigorous, happy, playful calf licking my hand.” 

After practising on 38 calves, Cohn and Frazier progressed to human trials — selecting a 55-year-old man called Craig Lewis, who was suffering from amyloidosis, a rare autoimmune disease that causes a build-up of abnormal proteins and, in turn, rapid heart, kidney and liver failure. 

Lewis’ heart had become so damaged that doctors gave him about 12 hours to live, at which point his wife Linda suggested something drastic. 

His wife Linda said, “He wanted to live, and we didn’t want to lose him. You never know how much time you have, but it was worth it.” 

In March 2011, she approached Cohn and Frazier, who removed her husband’s heart and installed the artificial device 

Linda said, “I listened and it was a hum, which is amazing. He didn’t have a pulse.” 

She said her husband – who worked for the city of Houston, maintaining the city’s vast system of wastewater pumps — would have appreciated the pulseless heart cobbled together from various materials, with Cohn explaining, “Dacron on the inside and fibreglass impregnated in silicone on the outside. There’s a moderate amount of homemade stuff on here.”

Source: Agencies