Robert Jarvik, who co-designed the first permanent artificial heart, dies at 79
Jarvik received his medical degree at the University of Utah, and the implant of the first permanent artificial heart took place at the school as well. The surgery became the subject of both public fascination and fierce debate over medical ethics.
According to The New York Times, Jarvik's wife, Marilyn vos Savant, said his cause of death was complications from Parkinson's disease.
Jarvik was born in Midland, Michigan on May 11, 1946, and grew up in Stamford, Connecticut. His father, Norman, was a physician who ran a family practice and his mother Edythe ran scheduling at the practice, according to The New York Times.
Growing up, he was a 'tinkerer' who planned to study architecture but turned his interest to medicine after his father survived an aortic aneurysm, the Times obitury said. Norman Jarvik later died of a second aortic aneurysm.
Jarvik attended Syracuse University before studying medicine for two years at Italy's University of Bologna. Jarvik received a master's degree in occupational biomechanics from New York University and then moved to the University of Utah in 1971 where he completed a medical degree in 1976.
Jarvik did not follow the traditional medical career path of internship and residency, because he was more interested in developing an artificial heart, per The New York Times.
He married Vos Savant in 1985, who survives him.
Jarvik had two children, Kate Jarvik Birch and Tyler Jarvik, from his marriage to playwright and former Deseret News journalist Elaine Levin Jarvik, to whom he was married from 1968 to 1985. Vos Savant also has two children from a previous relationship, Mary Blinder and Dennis Younglove. Jarvik had five grandchildren.
Jarvik was on a team that worked with Dr. Willem Kolff, the director of the university's Division of Artificial Organs, to design a series of mechanical hearts. One of them, in 1982, was implanted in a cow named Alfred Lord Tennyson, who survived for 268 days, setting a record for an animal.
It was in 1982 that the U.S. Food and Drug Administration gave permission to the University of Utah to implant a permanent artificial heart in a human. On Dec. 2, 1982, Dr. William C. DeVries led the surgical team that implanted the Jarvik-7 model in Barney Clark, a 61-year-old retired dentist. To encourage excellent work, Kolff put a student's name on a version of the heart to which they'd made a significant alteration, which is how the heart became the Jarvik-7, as Deseret News reported.
The surgery to implant the Jarvik-7, made of aluminum and plastic, lasted seven hours and afterwards Clark told his wife, 'I want to tell you even though I have no heart, I still love you,' per the University of Utah.
Clark survived 112 days attached to a 400-pound air compressor — roughly the size of a dishwasher — which helped the Jarvik-7 pump blood through his body. He never left the hospital and the complications included seizures, kidney failure and a broken valve on the artificial heart.
Clark died on March 23, 1983, of complications of a bacterial infection of the colon.
The second and third patient lived 620 days and 488 days, respectively, after receiving the experimental heart.
According to The New York Times, their survival showed that people 'could live long term on the plastic and metal device,' but that the complications the recipients suffered 'impaired the quality of their lives and blunted initial enthusiasm for the heart.'
Reporters from all over flocked to University of Utah hospital to cover the artificial heart. The news was celebrated by some, criticized by others. 'By the mid-1980s, medical ethicists and theologians were debating whether artificial hearts improved life or extended a painful decline toward death,' per The New York Times.
The Jarvik-7 was implanted in five patients as a permanent artificial heart and used hundreds of times as a temporary implant as patients waited for a donor heart. The FDA withdrew approval in 1990.
In 2018, Jarvik was honored by United Business Media for Lifetime Achievement, according to The University of Utah.
After leading Symbion, Inc., which was based in Salt Lake City, Jarvik founded Jarvik Heart, Inc. in 1987, based in New York. The company developed smaller, less obtrusive ventricular assist devices that helped pump blood from the heart's lower chambers to the rest of the body.
The Jarvik 2000 is around the size of a C battery and its pediatric version, the Jarvik 2015, is about the size of a AA battery, per The New York Times.
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