In recent years, modern medicine has provided us with everything from new vaccines to protect us from deadly diseases to groundbreaking treatments. It has given us hope of a longer life. Surgeons did decades of research and experiments to create a machine that wouldn’t break down (stop working) or cause blood clots and infections like the heart. Back in 2011 two doctors at the Texas Heart Institute created a machine that could allow a human to live without a heart, one of the body’s most important organs.
They developed a device that used whirling rotors (mechanism - see photo) 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. They removed the calf’s heart and successfully replaced it with two centrifugal pumps, which circulated the blood through her. When they checked the calf and listened to its chest with a stethoscope, they couldn’t hear a heartbeat. There was no pulse, and the EKG test had a flat line. Everything showed that she was dead, but the calf was very much alive, happy and was playfully licking the doctor’s hand!"
After practicing on 38 calves, Dr Cohn and Dr Frazier progressed to human trials. They selected a 55-year-old man called Craig Lewis, who was suffering from amyloidosis, a rare disease that causes 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 to his chest and there was a humming sound (sound like a honey bee), which is amazing. He didn't have a pulse nor a heartbeat." The doctors said the continuous-flow pump should last longer than other artificial hearts, and would cause fewer problems.
Our heart beats in a rhythm and does not flow continuously as in this machine. After the procedure, Lewis woke up and began to recover. He was able to speak and sit up in a chair. However, in a month or so, his condition then began to deteriorate as the disease that had attacked his liver and kidneys, and he sadly passed away in April 2011. But he did manage to live for more than a month with the pulseless mechanic heart, and his doctors said the pumps had worked flawlessly.
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