Word: cooley
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Although Houston's Dr. Denton A. Cooley has transplanted more human hearts than any other surgeon, he still finds them in short supply. So last week he implanted the world's first completely artificial heart as a stopgap measure while he and the patient waited for a suitable heart donor...
...operating table at St. Luke's Episcopal Hospital was Haskell Karp, 47, a printing estimator from Skokie,III., his heart drastically damaged by coronary-artery disease. Karp had had an implanted pacemaker for eleven months, but it was failing. Cooley first tried to save him by cutting out the dead area of heart muscle and stitching the sides of the hole together with a piece of Dacron for reinforcement. But when this was done, Karp's heart refused to beat spontaneously. Karp had been linked during the operation to a heart-lung machine, both breathing...
Transplants, Cooley told an American College of Cardiology meeting in Los Angeles, have produced evidence that the development of a successful artificial heart "may actually be easier than we had previously believed." The explanation: nature has provided the mammalian (including the human) heart with an elaborate fail-safe system of dual controls, one through the nervous system and another through hormonal channels. Early researchers on artificial hearts were overwhelmed by the difficulties of trying to duplicate these enormously complex natural systems. This, said Cooley, is not necessary...
Responsive Enough. The transplanted heart has no connections with the brain, Cooley pointed out, and therefore cannot respond to nervous stimuli that, for example, make the normal heart beat faster when a person is excited. Yet although the transplanted heart is less sensitive, it is able to keep the recipient alive and is responsive enough to permit him a reasonable degree of activity. An artificial heart, Cooley suggested, need do no more. Artificial heart research, which will surely benefit from the knowledge gained by transplants, may in turn help to explain why the natural heart, with no connection...
...devices "because anything artificial is looked upon with suspicion." He predicted that physicians would revise their thinking when they realize that the familiar heart drugs, in which they put great confidence today, cannot save patients whom an artificial heart might keep alive. But until man-made devices come along, Cooley intends to continue with transplants...