No, this is not the title of another movie about managed care, sorry.
But this post does have to do with beat-less human hearts– check out this article from MIT’s Technology Review. They discuss a new artificial heart with an innovative “pulse-free architecture.” They pump blood through the body continuously, rather than with the periodic beat of the normal heart. These devices (“device” sounds a little cold for a replacement heart) were designed by O.H. “Bud” Frazier, a prominent heart surgeon and pioneer in the development of cardiac devices at the Texas Heart Institute in Houston. They have “continuous flow pumps that are like little turbo machines,” says Tim Baldwin, program director of the advanced technologies and surgery branch of the National Heart, Lung and Blood Institute in Bethesda MD. They’re smaller, they can pump more blood, and they’re more durable than the alternatives. All of this is great news.
Besides the technical question of whether a pulse is important to get blood to all the small capillaries (some say yes, some say no), I cannot help but wonder what would living pulse-free be like. Instead of a thump in our chest, would there be a hum? What does having a beat mean to us? Is it fundamental to some universal life-rhythm without which we feel less than human? Who knows? And does any of this make one bit of difference when you are the one on the operating table? Probably not. But it does pose a challenge to song writers who will now have to learn something about fluid dynamics when composing love songs.
