TECHNO BEAT: The complex electronics that drive Carmat’s artificial heartCARMAT
In the mid-1960s, Bud Frazier met a 19-year-old man who had traveled with his mother from Italy to Texas to receive an aortic valve replacement. Frazier was in medical school, and he remembers how happy the man was at the prospect of having a normal heart. But in the hospital the patient’s heart arrested. Doctors opened up his chest, and Frazier’s job was to reach in and massage the heart to try to jump-start its beating.
Frazier rhythmically squeezed the man’s cardiac tissue between his fingers, but couldn’t get the heart to pump on its own, and eventually Michael DeBakey—a pioneering heart surgeon who was training Frazier at Baylor College of Medicine—told his student to stop trying. “I couldn’t quit, because as long as I ...
