Synthetic organs: the holy grail of the biomedical technology. With the ability to produce organs artificially, we eliminate the need for donor organs from recently dead things. There are a number of issues that crop up when you try implanting foreign objects into the human body. Rejection, clotting, and infection are just of few of the biological issues that such procedures have. You also have to make sure the device is small enough to fit in the body without squishing anything, and then there are the issues with maintenance and power. It’s all very complicated, rest assured, but we have a few working artificial organs out there. Most notably--the Jarvik artificial heart, which has been the super star of the artificial organ world for a while now. However, as with all things in life, a challenger has appeared. Drs. O. H. Frazier and William Cohn have developed a new and way more awesome system than the shit that Jarvik has been working with.
Don’t get me wrong, Jarvik’s stuff is functional enough for its time. I just really don’t like the man. His initial patent was stolen from Paul Winchell. Winchell, in addition to being a kick ass voice actor (voicing Gargamell from the fucking Smurfs, and my all time favorite cartoon character ever--Zummi mother fucking Gummi), a ventriloquist, a hypnotist and an acupuncturist, holds patents on 30 different devices ranging from disposable razors, blood plasma defrosters, flameless cigarette lighters, invisible garter belts and fountain pens. The man was a fucking childhood hero of mine, and Jarvik is a pussy for stealing his patent.
Jarvik later designed further models of his heart based on Winchell’s design, but they work just well enough to suck. He modeled them after an actual heart. Remember how well designed and efficient the human body is? Yeah, me neither. His heart required a shopping cart sized apparatus to be connected to it at all times. In addition to severely limiting the mobility of the patient, it was all around a massive piece of shit. I suppose I can forgive the design as working with what you have at your disposal, but wait till you hear this next part.
So for years we’ve had these devices, Ventricular Assistance Devices (VAD), that we use to pump blood in and out of the body when we’re bypassing the heart for surgery or because someone got really drunk and thought it’d be fun to pump your bodily fluids through a huge machine and take some Facebook photos. Well, Drs. O. H. Frazier and William Cohn thought it’d be good to just take the VAD technology and stick two of them in your chest with a battery and be done with the heart all together. Thing is, it works like a fucking charm. The devices are little more than two little turbines and a tube. It’s brilliant. It doesn’t clog like Jarvik’s heart is prone to, it requires little energy to power, and it’s made of some future space polymer (see magic) so it doesn’t get eaten by the immune system. It’s got its problems, but I couldn’t for the life of me tell you what they are. It’s still under trial, but so far the guy they put the first one into never had a problem with it. Well, he died, but only because the disease he'd been struck with did what it had started to do on his heart to all his other organs. The artificial heart worked perfectly for the month it was in there with no complications.
This technology isn’t exactly in its infancy, but it’s still pretty new. It’s reaching a point where we can feasibly be using them as fully functional replacements within the next 15 years or so, but that might be a conservative estimate. There are still a bunch of issues to overcome, such as a reliable means to power them and the issue of maintaining it long term, not to mention getting the devices to compensate for times of increased blood flow requirements (such as fucking or running). It’s still pretty exciting stuff, and I’m feeling fucking fantastic about the progress we’ve made so far. If you want any real information about it, well, Google that shit. It’s all over the web right now, and Wikipedia is always there for that shit. What am I, your fucking librarian?
