The trend toward using artificial hearts to keep patients alive until human donor hearts are available is important, DeVries believes, but he has faith in the future of mechanical alternatives. Some who had dropped out of the research dropped back in. With the Schroeder case, some of the most vocal critics began taking a second look, he said. "It was beginning to fail when Schroeder died," he said.īut when a feisty Schroeder chided then-President Reagan over a Social Security problem, DeVries added it to a growing list of evidence that the artificial heart could someday offer a reasonable alternative for many people whose natural hearts gave out. Schroeder's experience was important, DeVries said, because it taught the researchers more about what they could expect regarding the functional life of the plastic-and-metal heart itself. In a new community, his case load was light enough to allow him to concentrate on several more implants, including the surgery on John Schroeder, an Indianan who lived almost two years with a Jarvik-7. I wanted to keep the momentum building," DeVries said. (The heart project) was the most important thing in the world to me. He found them at Humana's Audubon Hospital, a large, active medical center with a strong car-di-ology program. That less-than-enthusiastic response, which since has reversed itself, coupled with some internal dissensions that had the Utah program in limbo, sent DeVries looking for greener pastures. The profession was looking at the artificial heart as a passing curiosity," DeVries said. "I was enormously excited about the Clark experience, but it hadn't caught on in medical circles. The huge Humana Hospital organization had agreed to underwrite the costs of up to 100 implants. Humana Heart Institute in Louisville, Ky. was moving so slowly toward a second artificial heart experience, left in 1984 for the Interviewed by telephone, they shared these perceptions, 10 years later, with the Deseret News.ĭeVries, who was frustrated that the U. The team began scattering a couple of years after the Clark experience. What really happened - as the scientists could have anticipated - has been a laborious step-by-step ongoing progress toward more practical artificial hearts. Many supposed that within a few years thousands of people whose hearts had failed them would be walking around, playing golf, dancing, working, pursuing normal lives, with man-made devices clicking away within their chests. The drama and immediacy of the artificial heart experiment led a fascinated public to some misperceptions about the science. The results of scientific experimentation that generally is noted only by scientists in the quiet retreats of their labs was splashed across newspaper pages and TV screens. The public had an unprecedented opportunity to peek over the shoulders of doctors and technical experts as they evaluated the long-term potential of a new medical device. vice president for health care, upon whose every word the media hung. and refined it into the Jarvik-7, object of the experiment Barney Clark, who knew his life was slipping away, his heart irreversibly damaged by disease, but who was willing to make a contribution to medical science his wife, Una Loy, whose life as housewife and mother had prepared her to participate loyally through the duration of an often heart-wrenching ordeal, but had not prepared her for the constant limelight and total loss of privacy Dr. Robert Jarvik, boyishly handsome physician-inventor who had taken a device already under development at the U. DeVries, gangly young surgeon who appeared more suited for a basketball floor than a surgery suite Dr. Willem Kolff, inventor of the artificial kidney and the nucleus around which the implant team gathered Dr. The faces of the implant team appeared on the covers of virtually every leading publication around the world.They were a fascinating group: Dr. The daily - sometimes hourly - fortunes of retired Seattle dentist Barney Clark were reported in detail as he weathered the ups and downs of life with an The University of Utah Hospital was besieged with requests for information about its famous patient - the first human to be implanted with a mechanical device on which his life would depend until it was over. 2, 1982, to Mathe world watched and waited.
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