![]() ![]() There are things that are worse than death and this was one of them.” By the 21st day the device had infected Schroeder’s blood. Boston University bioethicist George Annas, an expert on human experimentation, says: “I talked to Bill…and he hated the artificial heart. The second patient to get the Jarvik-7, William Schroeder, lived for an amazing 620 days. Powered by air cables running from a washing-machine-sized console into Clark’s chest, the pneumatic pump proved that a mechanical heart could sustain human life. A one-time medical miracle, the device now resides on the short list of technologies American society has labeled “Just Not Worth It.” How it ended up there, alongside supersonic planes and nuclear power plants, is a story that dates back to 1982, when a University of Utah surgical team replaced the diseased heart of 61-year-old dentist Barney Clark with a device called the Jarvik-7. ![]() The reason for this extraordinary kid-gloves approach is the artificial heart’s troubled history. Even the decision to grant TR access to Abiomed’s engineers and facilities was a carefully considered media “test case.” What’s more, Lederman has devised a complicated credit-sharing scheme to ensure that no single player steals the limelight of what he believes will be a “very visible” event. Before the doctors and nurses don their gloves, Abiomed’s recently convened board of ethical advisors will have spent months overseeing the selection of candidates. Lederman confides that Abiomed, moving cautiously, will seek permission to undertake a surgical dry run on a brain-dead individual on total life support. That first patient will, in all likelihood, already be dead. David Lederman, Abiomed’s CEO, says they’ll be performing the surgery on a human before 2000 is out. Surgeons at the Texas Heart Institute and Massachusetts General Hospital, among others, are now practicing putting the synthetic heart into calves. Each of the four teams was tapped a year ago by Abiomed, a little-known Danvers, Mass., company whose engineers have worked for more than a decade to build a 900-gram electromechanical pump they call the PulsaCor. medical centers, surgeons, nurses and anesthesiologists are quietly scrubbing in for the return of one of the most vilified medical devices ever conceived-the artificial heart. ![]()
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