In the late 1970s American television viewers were captivated by a weekly drama called The Six Million Dollar Man, starring Lee Majors as secret agent Steve Austin. Austin was a cyborg, a flesh-and-blood man brought back from near death and bioengineered to be superhuman in strength, speed and vision. During the series’s five-year run, Austin entered the popular idiom as “the bionic man.”

An era of technological optimism had been gathering momentum since the 1960s, in large part following the stunning successes of the space program. There was a growing confidence that American scientific ingenuity could engineer almost anything—including the human body. Indeed, at the same time that astronauts started flying into space, the government also set its sights on the gold ring of bioengineering: a permanent mechanical replacement for the human heart.

This article was originally published with the title Not Just a Pump.

3 Comments

1. 1. Deraj Yar 06:51 PM 2/11/08

   Very interesting article. I wonder which is more viable:
   1.) The prospect of heart-regeneration or replacement with stem cells.
   
   2.) A Mechanical heart.
   
   It seems that if we could nail down the technology, a stem cell heart would fare better. I think it would decrease the risk of infection and would probably last much longer than the mechanical one.

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2. 2. Ross Nicholson 07:21 AM 6/5/08

   The heart is also a 'blood shocker' in that blood is exposed to a transient electric field (QRS on the EKG) In the field all dipoles of a polar fluid (such as blood) line up, but when the field is withdrawn, the dipoles oscillate back into line (the T wave, also U wave, Osborne wave). The shock's physiological function is to separate BPG from oppositely charged hemoglobin and liberate CO2. With bis phosphogluterate liberated from hemoglobin and so much O2 in the lungs, oxygen is taken up. The QRS shock also may generate electrostatic repulsion of RBC's--to avoid adherence. Thus the 'current of injury' is purposeful and might be emulated artificially. The difficulty may be atherosclerotic build-up. (Atherosclerotic plaques are electrodeposited, accounting for their multi- crystalline structure, their preference for turbulence, their sticking only to innervated arteries, etc.) Thus, pacemakers might be affixed to heart lung machines and artificial hearts to improve gas exchange.

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3. 3. Miragezero in reply to Deraj Yar 12:34 PM 7/12/08

   Do not underestimate mechanical durability. I know things are a lot different in the body, but we have pumps at work that have pumped for a dozen years or more without so much as a hiccup. I know the the technology can be improved for a heart that will last indefinitely. It is all quality of materials, control etc... I find it difficult to believe that the jarvis model was allowed to be placed in service if particles were going to cling to it. I am a layman in medical terms but this seems to be an easily forseeable problem. In any case, I believe someday within a couple of decades we will have a small, efficient, and extremely durable artifical heart.

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