By Xeno
55 year old Craig Lewis lived for a month without a heartbeat or a pulse. If you had listened to his chest, you would heard silence. If you had hooked him up to an electrocardiograph, you wouldn’t have heard the familiar beep, beep, beep. You would have seen a flat line.
Lewis heart was replaced with a pair of pulseless pumps. Cobbled together from existing ventricular-assist implants and “a moderate amount of homemade stuff,” by Dr. Billy Cohn and Dr. Bud Frazier of the Texas Heart Institute, the artificial heart continuously pumps blood using screw-shaped propellers. Hence, constant blood flow without a beat.
Cohn says that the beat is there only because that’s the way the heart works. When they swapped it out for their contraption, “none of the other organs seem[ed] to care... More...
