For most of my life, I’ve had minor heart palpitations. They’ve never been very serious, at their worst making me mildly uncomfortable for a few seconds, but they've always thrown me a little off my guard. An irregular heartbeat is an uncomfortable thing to experience; that pumping rhythm is there one’s entire life, and the body doesn’t react well when the tempo switches up.
But what if there was no tempo? Enter science. NPR recently covered a story about an artificial heart that doesn’t act like a heart at all… at least in the traditional sense. In the past, artificial hearts like the Jarvik 7 were designed to mimic the natural processes of the originals – mainly, the electrically-stimulated 'pumping' action – and act as a total replacement for the damaged organs. In most cases, though, damage wasn’t severe enough to cause a total shutdown, and so a total heart replacement would actually do more harm than good.
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| ...in some cases. |
