JARVIK IS THE MAN WHO GAVE THE WORLD HOPE FOR HEART REPLACEMENTS

Robert Koffler Jarvik, inventor of the first permanently-implantable artificial heart, was born in Michigan on May 11, 1946. He demonstrated his mechanical aptitude early, having invented such useful devices as a surgical stapler and other medical tools when he was just a teenager.
In 1964, Jarvik was a student at the University of Utah. His father became ill with heart disease and had to have open heart surgery. That is when Jarvik learned that many heart disease patients need heart transplants. In some cases, however, heart disease is so severe that a patient may not survive the wait for a donor heart. In an effort to help those patients live as long as possible with the heart they have, medical scientists had begun to develop electronic devices such as defibrillators, pacemakers, and artificial heart models.
Jarvik became very interested in medicine at that point, and he began to think about possible designs for artificial hearts that could help people like his father. He decided to go to medical school. He graduated with his MD in 1976 from the University of Utah.

Robert Jarvik, MD is widely known as the inventor of the first successful permanent artificial heart, the Jarvik 7. In 1982, the first implantation of the Jarvik 7 in patient Barney Clark caught the attention of media around the world.

In essence, two types of artificial hearts exist today: total artificial heart — which is implanted after the natural heart is removed — and the ventricular assist device — which is implanted to assist the natural heart, leaving the patient's own heart in place and still functioning.

"Removing a person's heart is one of the most dramatic surgical procedures one can imagine," says Dr. Jarvik, who began developing a tiny ventricular assist device, the Jarvik 2000, in 1988.

After the first five permanent cases, the Jarvik 7 heart became more widely used as a temporary total artificial heart, bridging patients to transplant. The sixth patient lived five years after a donor heart was found, and the seventh patient lived eleven years with his donated heart. Another patient was bridged from the Jarvik 7 heart to a human heart that gave him fourteen more years of normal life.
Today the number of patients implanted with the Jarvik designed devices is in the hundreds and the research continues worldwide. We owe so much to this genius and the years ahead should prove very fruitful for saving heart patients that might not have had a chance before.