Ticker by Mimi Swartz

Author:Mimi Swartz
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Crown/Archetype
Published: 2018-08-06T16:00:00+00:00

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It was a credit to Bud’s obsessiveness—or his West Texas stubbornness, or his sometimes fritzy connection with the real world—that he persisted with his faith in continuous flow, despite the opposition from his colleagues. But there was another reason as well. In 1986, at a medical conference, two radically different men had approached him who supported his idea. In fact, they had been working independently on pulseless devices themselves. One was an engineer and heart surgeon by the name of Richard Wampler; the other was Robert Jarvik. Jarvik didn’t know Wampler, and Wampler didn’t know Jarvik. Wampler knew Frazier pretty much by reputation alone, while Jarvik and Frazier’s relationship was like those couples who couldn’t live with or without each other. Yes, most heart surgeons and cardiologists were pretty sure Frazier’s pulseless heart notion was nuts. But everyone also knew that if you had wanted to explore something new in terms of the human heart, Bud was just about the only researcher to see, which was why Wampler and Jarvik sought him out.

Like Denton Cooley, Richard Wampler had always been an irrepressible tinkerer, the kid who fixed broken lawn mowers in his neighborhood in Bloomington, Indiana. When he was a boy, Wampler’s beloved grandfather died of heart disease. The sense of helplessness he felt at his grandfather’s bedside, while the doctors and nurses were shocking him with paddles trying to save his life, spurred him toward a career in medicine and also toward the belief that an artificial heart was not just possible but necessary. Maybe, he thought, he was the person who might be able to invent it.

Wampler was not a world-beater in the conventional sense. A classic midwesterner with soulful blue eyes, he was unflappable and wry. He also had a sense of adventure and a sense of obligation that found him in a small Egyptian village called El Bayad in 1976. Wampler was on a volunteer mission to help villagers improve their water supply. One day he saw two men using a submersible pump to draw water from Nile canals into their fields for irrigation. Because he was an engineer, and an expert on pumps, Wampler recognized this long tube with an internal, narrow corkscrew as an Archimedes’ screw. Named after the third-century Greek mathematician, it worked like a plumber’s augur. With the turn of a crank, water could be scooped from a lower place and forced to flow upward to another spot.

Not many people would have thought that such a pump might be useful in treating heart disease, but most people did not see the world the way Wampler did. Like Bud’s, his mind rarely strayed far from the idea of fixing damaged hearts. And like Bud, he had come to believe that the current iterations of heart pumps weren’t good enough. Even with recent improvements, they were difficult and tricky to implant, and therefore dangerous: a surgeon had to open a patient’s chest and cut into the heart and the aorta to attach them.

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