Latest news with #Jarvik-7
Yahoo
3 days ago
- Business
- Yahoo
Robert Jarvik, who co-designed the first permanent artificial heart, dies at 79
Dr. Robert Jarvik, who was a key designer of the first permanent artificial heart implanted in a human, died on Monday in his Manhattan home at age 79. Jarvik received his medical degree at the University of Utah, and the implant of the first permanent artificial heart took place at the school as well. The surgery became the subject of both public fascination and fierce debate over medical ethics. According to The New York Times, Jarvik's wife, Marilyn vos Savant, said his cause of death was complications from Parkinson's disease. Jarvik was born in Midland, Michigan on May 11, 1946, and grew up in Stamford, Connecticut. His father, Norman, was a physician who ran a family practice and his mother Edythe ran scheduling at the practice, according to The New York Times. Growing up, he was a 'tinkerer' who planned to study architecture but turned his interest to medicine after his father survived an aortic aneurysm, the Times obitury said. Norman Jarvik later died of a second aortic aneurysm. Jarvik attended Syracuse University before studying medicine for two years at Italy's University of Bologna. Jarvik received a master's degree in occupational biomechanics from New York University and then moved to the University of Utah in 1971 where he completed a medical degree in 1976. Jarvik did not follow the traditional medical career path of internship and residency, because he was more interested in developing an artificial heart, per The New York Times. He married Vos Savant in 1985, who survives him. Jarvik had two children, Kate Jarvik Birch and Tyler Jarvik, from his marriage to playwright and former Deseret News journalist Elaine Levin Jarvik, to whom he was married from 1968 to 1985. Vos Savant also has two children from a previous relationship, Mary Blinder and Dennis Younglove. Jarvik had five grandchildren. Jarvik was on a team that worked with Dr. Willem Kolff, the director of the university's Division of Artificial Organs, to design a series of mechanical hearts. One of them, in 1982, was implanted in a cow named Alfred Lord Tennyson, who survived for 268 days, setting a record for an animal. It was in 1982 that the U.S. Food and Drug Administration gave permission to the University of Utah to implant a permanent artificial heart in a human. On Dec. 2, 1982, Dr. William C. DeVries led the surgical team that implanted the Jarvik-7 model in Barney Clark, a 61-year-old retired dentist. To encourage excellent work, Kolff put a student's name on a version of the heart to which they'd made a significant alteration, which is how the heart became the Jarvik-7, as Deseret News reported. The surgery to implant the Jarvik-7, made of aluminum and plastic, lasted seven hours and afterwards Clark told his wife, 'I want to tell you even though I have no heart, I still love you,' per the University of Utah. Clark survived 112 days attached to a 400-pound air compressor — roughly the size of a dishwasher — which helped the Jarvik-7 pump blood through his body. He never left the hospital and the complications included seizures, kidney failure and a broken valve on the artificial heart. Clark died on March 23, 1983, of complications of a bacterial infection of the colon. The second and third patient lived 620 days and 488 days, respectively, after receiving the experimental heart. According to The New York Times, their survival showed that people 'could live long term on the plastic and metal device,' but that the complications the recipients suffered 'impaired the quality of their lives and blunted initial enthusiasm for the heart.' Reporters from all over flocked to University of Utah hospital to cover the artificial heart. The news was celebrated by some, criticized by others. 'By the mid-1980s, medical ethicists and theologians were debating whether artificial hearts improved life or extended a painful decline toward death,' per The New York Times. The Jarvik-7 was implanted in five patients as a permanent artificial heart and used hundreds of times as a temporary implant as patients waited for a donor heart. The FDA withdrew approval in 1990. In 2018, Jarvik was honored by United Business Media for Lifetime Achievement, according to The University of Utah. After leading Symbion, Inc., which was based in Salt Lake City, Jarvik founded Jarvik Heart, Inc. in 1987, based in New York. The company developed smaller, less obtrusive ventricular assist devices that helped pump blood from the heart's lower chambers to the rest of the body. The Jarvik 2000 is around the size of a C battery and its pediatric version, the Jarvik 2015, is about the size of a AA battery, per The New York Times.
Boston Globe
4 days ago
- Health
- Boston Globe
Robert Jarvik, 79, dies; a designer of the first permanent artificial heart
Clark at first declined to receive the Jarvik-7, 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. 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. Get Starting Point A guide through the most important stories of the morning, delivered Monday through Friday. Enter Email Sign Up During the seven-hour surgery, according to the retrospective, Clark's heart muscle tore like tissue paper as it was removed after so many years of being treated with steroids. Advertisement Upon awakening, DeVries said, Clark told his wife, Una Loy Clark, 'I want to tell you even though I have no heart, I still love you.' 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. Advertisement DeVries said in 2012 that Clark had probably received too many antibiotics, which can make it more difficult to fight off infections. He died 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 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 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.' Advertisement 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 FDA 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 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 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. Norman Jarvik died in 1976 after a second aneurysm. Advertisement '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 hearts. One of them, according to an article in the 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 Vos Savant, who was listed in Guinness World Records in the 1980s as having the highest recorded IQ (228). In addition to his wife, Dr. Jarvik leaves 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; Vos Savant's two children, Mary (Younglove) Blinder and Dennis Younglove, from a previous relationship; a sister, Barbara, and a brother, Jonathan; and five grandchildren. 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. Advertisement 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. This article originally appeared in
