An odyssey in mechanical circulatory support.

摘要

In 1967, I was a clinical associate in the Cardiac Surgery Branch of the National Heart Institute. I had already been working on mechanical heart development for 7 years. When the news broke that the first successful heart transplant had just been performed, one of my colleagues remarked, "it would have been a great research project but it looks like we won't need those mechanical hearts." To the contrary, the greatest stimulus to mechanical heart development has been cardiac transplantation. This highly successful operation shows what can be accomplished when a new heart is substituted for the old. Furthermore, we now know that the need for human donor hearts can never be fulfilled by our current procurement techniques.