Barney Clark, 61 years old, a retired dentist.
Not long ago, he told a friend, “If I can do something for mankind, I will.”
Today, he made medical history as the first human to receive a permanent artificial heart.
In December of 1982, doctors at the University of Utah removed a diseased and ailing heart
from the chest of Barney Clark.
His heart was really not pumping.
It was just almost quivering.
They replaced it with a man-made device: the Jarvik 7 artificial heart.
It goes right where your heart would go in your chest.
Clark survived the surgery, and the heart was hailed
as a breakthrough in the fight against heart disease.
The artificial heart is, in some important ways, stronger than the natural heart.
I thought it was going to help a lot of people. I thought it was going to immediately take off.
But complications with the artificial heart led to questions:
Does it cause dangerous clots?
Is the cost in suffering too high?
More than three decades later, heart disease is still the leading cause of death in America.
Did the device inspire artificial hope or real change?
If you want to take out something that’s bad and put something good in there,
that's a win-win for everybody.
At seven minutes after midnight, the heart was removed.
Barney Clark was near death when doctors rushed him into surgery.
He had end stage congestive heart failure and was out of options.
He was too old for a transplant.
He had no drugs that would help him.
And the only thing he had to look forward to was dying.
Days earlier, Clark had agreed to have his heart replaced by a man-made one
as part of an experimental study led by heart surgeon William DeVries.
Most people would say, ‘I want to live longer,’
but he said, “I want to do something that may help the people that come after me."
The pioneering surgery lasted 7 and a half hours.
The whole team’s up there.
We wait ‘til his heart stops, and then we put the heart in him,
and then the heart starts beating.
And we’re all excited.
I mean, it was intense, let me tell you.
Every fiber of my being was on full alert.
Barney Clark is doing just fine tonight.
But he’s not out of the woods yet.
He’s breathing on his own and has spoken his first words since surgery.
He wanted a glass of water.
When he woke up, he said, “I, I, I—This feels good.
I’m glad I’m beating.”
And then he looked at his wife and she leaned down, and he said, “I want to tell you that
even though I don’t have a heart, I still love you.”
And there wasn’t a dry eye in the house.
What does it feel like to have an artificial heart in the chest?
Do you have pain or is it uncomfortable?
Not at all.
It’s feels...It’s comfortable.
The heart inside Barney Clark was called the Jarvik 7,
named after its lead inventor, Dr. Robert Jarvik.
We always have thought that it’s clearly a benefit to the patient to do this.
The Jarvik 7 was made up of two pumping chambers attached by velcro
and powered by a large external air compressor.
We believe it will serve a very large number of patients
that cannot be reached with heart transplants.
There just plain aren’t enough donors.
There are only about 2000 heart donors a year, yet tens of thousands of patients
who could benefit from a transplant.
The Jarvik 7 was hailed as a medical miracle
and the media covered every update on Clark’s condition.
By now he’s so familiar that he’s just like a member of the family.
I think he’s climbing a mountain, he’s not to the summit yet.
He had times when it was good and times it wasn't good.
He had trouble breathing.
Five hours into the 13th day of the artificial heart,
Dr. Clark had a sudden drop in blood pressure.
He was mainly bound in the hospital, but he could do more things with the heart
than he could without the heart.
This is a second chance at life for us and we’re very, very grateful.
During that second chance, Barney Clark battled seizures, infections, and more,
and nearly four months after receiving the artificial heart, he died.
His lungs failed.
Next his brain failed.
And lastly when the key was turned off, his heart failed.
When he died, I said to myself, ‘okay, I know that everybody’s going to look at this
as just an event, and looking at it as just possible chance that it worked.
We need to do it again.’
Good evening.
The operation was a success.
The patient is in stable condition.
That’s the word from Louisville, Kentucky tonight on William Schroeder.
In November of 1984, at Humana Heart Institute in Louisville, Kentucky, Dr. DeVries performed
an artificial heart operation on a second dying patient -- 52 year-old William Schroeder.
The results were dramatic.
Fantastic.
It’s just a complete turnaround.
In-in how you feel, or—
I can breathe.
I feel like I’ve got ten years going right now.
Well, we hope you do!
Well, I really do.
Bill Schroeder was incredible.
I mean, he— They had him on television a lot.
He wanted to talk to the TV because he loved talking to people.
Who knows, maybe I’ll be the bionic man.
In the days following his operation, Schroeder felt good enough to tell jokes and drink a beer.
He even asked President Ronald Reagan about his social security benefits.
I just keep on calling and keep on calling and I don’t get anywhere.
Well, I will get into it, and find out what this situation is.
He got his check the next day,
but shortly after, Schroeder had a stroke and his recovery stalled.
Schroeder lost consciousness for almost an hour.
He was paralyzed on his right side.
But the major continuing deficit from the stroke is Schroeder’s speech.
How are you feeling?
He feels real fine.
The heart is, is something that moves—the blood moves through it, and it.
If you damage the blood too much, it will clot.
And that was a real medical problem.
DeVries implanted artificial hearts in two more patients, but Schroeder outlived them both
and remained the center of media attention.
Can you wave to everybody?
Schroeder had more strokes and TV cameras documented his deteriorating health.
He can barely speak, is partially paralyzed, and often doesn’t recognize his family.
With images like these broadcast across the nation,
many began to question whether the artificial heart experiment was worth the suffering.
William Schroeder’s been living with an artificial heart.
Living, yes.
But the quality of his life has not been at all as his doctors and family had planned.
They’ve proven that you can prolong the dying process.
But they certainly haven’t proven that you can give anyone
any type of reasonable quality of life.
I’d turn on the news, read the newspaper,
and there was really bad articles came out about this is bad -- I was playing God, and
I should’ve let them die.
And if I really got upset, all I had to do was walk down the hall into one of the rooms.
I’d say, “Do you really want us to stop?’
Boy you'd say that, they’d - no, none of them said, “Stop.”
William Schroeder lived for nearly two years with his artificial heart.
But after he died in August of 1986, the Jarvik 7 went from Medical Miracle
to the 'Dracula of Medical Technology.'
Then, four years later, the FDA cited the heart's manufacturer
for quality control and reporting violations.
The government has withdrawn its approval of the Jarvik artificial heart.
Dr. DeVries was told to destroy his remaining hearts.
I had a whole bunch, I had, like, about 10 of them.
And I remember going in to the office of the administration of the hospital
with a knife and cutting holes in their diaphragm so I could never use them again.
That was probably the saddest day of my life.
His study was over, and the artificial heart faded from public view.
But it didn't go away.
More than two decades later,
Randy Shepherd's heart was failing so rapidly that he was in danger of dying at any moment.
With no donor heart available, his doctor gave him another option: the artificial heart.
I'm like woah, so you're cutting my heart out of my chest
and sticking, basically making me a robot.
I'm like, "what's Plan B? I don't want to do that."
But Shepherd did want to live, so he agreed to the surgery.
The FDA had approved a different use for the artificial heart:
not a permanent implant, but a temporary bridge to transplant.
It was a way to keep patients alive while waiting for a donor heart.
Shepherd's recovery from the surgery was difficult, especially mentally.
All of a sudden, my heart's gone and I've got a machine in there, and it's like, wow.
It was just a feeling of loss, of like, not being a person. Of not being a self.
He lived with his artificial heart for 14 months,
and now that he's had a heart transplant, he leads a normal, active life.
I'm running, trail running, lifting weights.
So looking back at this point, I can say absolutely it's worth it.
Without the artificial heart, I wouldn't be here.
Would not have made it to transplant without the artificial heart.
It’s very exciting, because I think things that couldn’t be done in the 1980’s
can now be done in patients who really need help.
Today what used to be called the Jarvik 7 is called the Syncardia Temporary Total Artificial Heart.
It now comes in different sizes, so it can fit more women and children.
Other than that, the device hasn’t changed much since the days of Barney Clark.
We have learned how to use it. There is no doubt that a device at that time
was ahead of its time. The concept was ahead of its time.
Doctors have learned how to control the blood clots and infections that plagued
the early patients, and the artificial heart
has now been used about 1600 times as a bridge to transplant.
Once the device is in and you turn it on, it’s quite remarkable. They go from almost
being dead to having what many people call a super heart.
And with the development of smaller, portable power packs, artificial heart patients can
even leave the hospital and live at home while waiting for a donor heart.
I have two dogs, so I go out and I walk in the backyard with my dogs, and I play with them.
I say 99 percent of my days are great.
Lance White has been waiting at home for nearly two years. The machine that powers his heart
weighs about 13 pounds and can be carried in a backpack.
Most of the time I’m plugged up to the wall with that.
Now if I want to go somewhere I can take it out, and I can have just this with me.
The machine makes a constant beating noise and is connected to the artificial heart by tubes,
but he’s not complaining.
If that’s the price I have to pay so to speak to do another 40, 50 years, to watch
my kids grow up, to have grandkids, that’s easy.
With the success of the artificial heart as a bridge to transplant, doctors see a future
once again for the device as a permanent implant, this time with the benefit of modern medical care.
The FDA have approved a trial, which allows this total artificial heart to be the complete
substitute for a heart transplant. And that’s called a bridge to a destination.
Which means that this will stay with you until you die.
At the Virginia Commonwealth University Medical Center, the very first patient in the trial
recently received a permanent artificial heart - the first since doctors operated on Barney Clark,
William Schroeder, and others three decades ago.
I think there’s undeniable evidence now that’s it’s been a big success in the long term.
It works great. And they’ve had electric hearts, and they’ve had all kinds of things
that say, “This is better and better,” but this heart is the only one that’s really
been used consecutively all that time and it’s withstanded 30, 40 years now.