Facts
The medical and scientific communities have come to realize that human-to-human transplantation is a dead-end street with limited possibilities to make big money-limited by the number of suitable organs available. It is because of this pesky limitation that they have been trying to come up with the ultimate solution: An endless supply of organs which would allow them to perform huge numbers of transplantation operations. The number of such operations would only be limited by their own greed and irresponsibility.
The first attempt went to the heart of the American dream: Cranking out endless numbers of artificial hearts would allow the "scientists" to " save "the lives of millions of people around the world while making billions of dollars. On top of that, they would receive the eternal gratitude of the human race for such a priceless gift of humanitarianism. But the dream soon evaporated when, beginning with dentist Barney Clark in 1983, all the recipients of the Jarvik plastic heart died one after another.
The reasons for the failure of plastic hearts are very simple. Among others, the brain and the nervous system can no longer control the beating of the heart, which must be powered by a machine. The machine always makes the heart beat at the same rate, regardless of whether the owner of the new plastic heart is agitated or at rest. This alone has tremendous implications that modern science cannot even begin to grasp. Besides, there jection problem cannot be solved unless massive amounts of immuno suppressant drugs are administered. This causes the patient to die from all kinds of infections because the immune system is invariably knocked out of commission by the drugs. These persistent problems led the FDA to shelve the Jarvik plastic heart in 1990. Back to square one.
| © 1998 Cyborg Senast uppdaterad 980218 |
