Robert Jarvik, 79, Dies; a Designer of the First Permanent Artificial Heart

New York Times

29-05-2025

Dr. Robert K. Jarvik, the principal designer of the first permanent artificial heart implanted in a human — a procedure that became a subject of great public fascination and fierce debate about medical ethics — died on Monday at his home in Manhattan. He was 79.
His wife, the writer Marilyn vos Savant, said the cause was complications of Parkinson's disease.
In 1982, the U.S. Food and Drug Administration gave the University of Utah permission to implant what was designed to be a permanent artificial heart in a human. On Dec. 2 that year, Dr. William C. DeVries led the pioneering surgical team that implanted the Jarvik-7 model, made of aluminum and plastic, in a 61-year-old retired Seattle dentist, Barney B. Clark.
Dr. Clark at first declined to receive the Jarvik-7, Dr. DeVries was quoted as saying in a 2012 university retrospective, but he changed his mind on Thanksgiving after he had to be carried by a son to the dinner table. Dr. Clark's chronic heart disease had left him weeks from death. If the surgery didn't work for him, he told doctors, maybe it would help others.
During the seven-hour surgery, according to the retrospective, Dr. Clark's heart muscle tore like tissue paper as it was removed after so many years of being treated with steroids.
Upon awakening, Dr. DeVries said, Dr. Clark told his wife, Una Loy Clark, 'I want to tell you even though I have no heart, I still love you.'
Dr. Clark survived for 112 days, attached to a 400-pound air compressor, roughly the size of a dishwasher, that helped the Jarvik-7 pump blood through his body. But he never left the hospital, and he experienced seizures, kidney failure and a broken valve on the heart that needed replacing.
Dr. DeVries said in 2012 that Dr. Clark had probably received too many antibiotics, which can make it more difficult to fight off infections. He died on March 23, 1983, from complications related to a bacterial infection of the colon.
William J. Schroeder, 52, a retired federal worker who was the second patient to receive the experimental Jarvik-7 artificial heart, lived for 620 days before dying in 1986. Another early recipient of the Jarvik-7, Murray P. Haydon, lived for 488 days before dying at 59.
Their survival demonstrated that people 'could live long term on the plastic and metal device,' The New York Times reported upon Mr. Schroeder's death. But the newspaper added that strokes and other complications that recipients suffered 'impaired the quality of their lives and blunted initial enthusiasm for the heart.'
Dozens — by some accounts hundreds — of reporters showed up at the University of Utah hospital to cover Barney Clark's surgery. Some celebrated the news, comparing the breakthrough to man's first walk on the moon. Others, however, criticized what they called the 'Frankenstein'-like aspects of the Jarvik-7 and asked whether the medical team was trying to play God by deciding who received the artificial heart.
By the mid-1980s, medical ethicists and theologians were debating whether artificial hearts improved life or extended a painful decline toward death. At a 1985 symposium of religious figures and doctors in Louisville, Ky., a Jesuit theologian noted that in the Christian view, 'life is a basic good but not an absolute good,' adding, 'There is a limit on what we may do to preserve our lives.'
After five patients received the Jarvik-7 as a permanent artificial heart, Dr. Jarvik said, the device was used hundreds of times as a temporary implant for patients until they could receive a donor heart. One such patient lived 11 years after receiving his donor heart, he said; another lived 14.
In January 1990, the Food and Drug Administration withdrew its approval of the Jarvik-7, citing concerns about the manufacturer's quality control.
In a 1989 interview with Syracuse University Magazine, Dr. Jarvik admitted that his belief that the Jarvik-7 was advanced enough to be used widely on a permanent basis was 'probably the biggest mistake I have ever made.'
Still, he defended his work. Of the five recipients of the permanent Jarvik-7, he told the magazine, 'These were people who I view as having had their lives prolonged,' adding that they survived nine months on average when some had been expected to live 'no more than a week.'
'I don't think that kind of thing makes a person in medicine want to stop,' he said. 'It just makes you all the more interested in working it through so it can be better.'
Robert Koffler Jarvik was born on May 11, 1946, in Midland, Mich., and grew up in Stamford, Conn. His father, Norman, was a physician with a family practice. His mother, Edythe (Koffler) Jarvik, handled scheduling for the practice and later taught typing.
From an early age, Robert was a tinkerer. As a teenager, he made his own hockey mask and began developing a surgical stapler. He attended Syracuse University from 1964 until 1968, intending to study architecture, but his interest turned to medicine after his father survived an aortic aneurysm, and he received a degree in zoology. Dr. Norman Jarvik died in 1976 after a second aneurysm.
'I knew that my father was going to die of heart disease, and I was trying to make a heart for him,' Robert Jarvik once said. 'I was too late.'
He studied medicine at the University of Bologna in Italy for two years and received a master's degree in occupational biomechanics from New York University before moving to the University of Utah in 1971. He received his medical degree there in 1976, but he did not follow the traditional career path of internship and residency. He was more interested in developing an artificial heart.
Working with Dr. Willem J. Kolff, director of the university's Division of Artificial Organs, Dr. Jarvik designed a series of mechanical heart. One of them, according to an article in The New York Times in 1982, was implanted in a cow named Alfred Lord Tennyson, who survived for 268 days, a record for an animal.
In 1985, Dr. Jarvik married Ms. Vos Savant, who was listed in Guinness World Records in the 1980s as having the highest recorded I.Q. (228).
She survives him, as do his daughter, Kate Jarvik Birch, and his son, Tyler Jarvik, from his marriage to Elaine Levin, whom he married in 1968 and divorced in 1985; Ms. Vos Savant's two children, Mary (Younglove) Blinder and Dennis Younglove, from a previous relationship; a sister, Barbara Jarvik, and a brother, Jonathan Jarvik; and five grandchildren.
In 2008, Dr. Jarvik faced scrutiny from a congressional committee that was investigating whether Pfizer misrepresented his credentials in an advertising campaign in which he served as a spokesman for Lipitor, the cholesterol medication. Pfizer ended the campaign.
In the late 1980s, his company, Jarvik Heart Inc., began developing smaller, less obtrusive implements, known as ventricular assist devices. Unlike the Jarvik-7, these devices do not replace a diseased heart but assist in pumping blood from the lower chambers of the heart to the rest of the body. One such device, the Jarvik 2000, is about the size of a C battery. A pediatric version, called the Jarvik 2015, is roughly the size of an AA battery.
According to a 2023 study of the artificial heart market, a descendant of the original Jarvik-7, now owned by another company, is called the SynCardia Total Artificial Heart. It is designed primarily for temporary use in patients who face imminent death while awaiting transplants. The study found that the device had been implanted in more than 1,700 patients worldwide.
In 2018, Dr. Jarvik received a lifetime achievement award at the annual Medical Design Excellence Awards ceremony. In an interview this week, Dr. O.H. Frazier, an innovator in heart surgery in Houston who helped develop the Jarvik 2000, called him 'a genius.'
'He had an agile mind,' Dr. Frazier said, 'and made a great contribution to the care of heart-failure patients.'