Informative Speech On Heart Transplants

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Today class, we are going to learn the about history of human-made replacement hearts for medical purposes. Around the 1980s surgeons realized that there has to be a way to bridge the gap between people who wait for an available heart transplant and the amount of transplantable hearts available. This was not clear to most surgeons in the beginning because most of the hearts collected for transplants came from healthy humans who suddenly died, such as someone in a car crash, but as cars got safer, these instances became rarer. The first version of a mechanical heart was designed by a ventriloquist named Paul Winchell who, with the help of Dr. Henry Heimlich, invented the Jarvik-7, the first device used to keep people alive while waiting for a transplantable heart. Unfortunately the Jarvik-7 requires the person to sit beside a big, noisy air compressor 24 hours a day with hoses piercing the…show more content…
This lead to the design of the Heartmate 1, a small pump to assist the left ventricle. This worked well for helping the heart but wasn't ready for replacing it due to it being under powered, meaning that patients still had to use the loud and cumbersome Jarvik-7 while waiting for a transplantable heart. Then in the 1990's a man named Dr. Billy Cohn along with the help of his partner, Dr. O.H. "Bud" Frazier, took on the task of improving the design of the HeartMate 1 and came up with the HeartMate 2. The HeartMate 2 is a huge improvement to the previous model for it's size (uses shorter pipes), it's power (spins at 12,000 rpm), and most of all, it's endurance (one model has been running continuously in a lab for eight years with no signs of wearing out). Initially the HeartMate 2 was only meant to assist the left ventricle just as it's predecessor did. However, quoting an article in Popular Science titled "No Pulse", shows different
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