How to Build an Artificial Heart | Hacker News Reader

How to Build an Artificial Heart

newyorker.com

28 pointsHooke7 comments

As someone with a faulty valve and other sundry heart defects, I don't see how you can read this article and not fault the FDA.

I've gone through two periods of extreme shortness of breath, it's not a good way to live, it's not a good way to die.

Especially if you can't even volunteer to move research forward.

I'm a big fan of countries who have made organ donation opt-in as the default.

Is 660k deaths per year due to heart failure insufficient to let people volunteer? Am I missing something here?

Did you mean to say you're a big fan of countries where opt-out is the default for organ donation? So by default, you will donate your organs

Not sure why anyone would want opt-out to be the default?

I love how you were correcting him and then made the exact same mistake.

Opt-out means you opt-out of default organ donation.

I was a medical student with Cohn and Frazier in 2012 at Texas Heart - it was an awesome experience. Every day we would either do a heart transplant or peel a heart mate II out of a box and implant that. I remember sitting in Cohn’s office and him doing magic tricks, lighting things on fire, or making us laugh. Frazier would always have a book in his lab coat, usually something in Russian, to read at his leisure. Truly visionary people. They have a good TED talk where you can get a good idea of their personalities.

In 2001 and 2002, the heart was installed in fourteen patients. That’s when the ambitious plans began to falter. “By nine months, all of them except four had died from either complications or device failure,” Cohn recounted.

I remember as a freshman going to a talk by the AbioMed folks that was very optimistic and rosy about the future, in about 2002. I think video of a patient talking about his artifical heart was involved. How disappointing that things didn't pan out.

This is definitely one of the few cases where extensive animal experiments need to be considered. Create a heart, put it into a thousand pigs and see how they do. Once they do fine, go over to hundreds of primates. Afterwards go on with terminal human patients.

It goes without saying that one should not waste animal lives or make them suffer for just any kind of experiments.

But if the practical engineering of auch a device appears to be that difficult we should not risk the whole company on small-scale human experiments.

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