This past July, cardiac surgeon O. H. “Bud” Frazier helped achieve the near culmination of his life’s work: the implantation in a patient’s chest of an artificial heart that, theoretically, will last decades. Now 84, Frazier, the codirector of the Center for Preclinical Surgical & Interventional Research at Houston’s Texas Heart Institute, has performed more than 1,200 transplant operations in his long career. Yet he came to believe such procedures were inadequate; they bought many patients years, not decades, of life. Frazier concluded, to the derision of many of his colleagues, that an artificial heart could be a better alternative. Just as air travel wasn’t possible until inventors stopped trying to imitate birds in flight, Frazier thought researchers could create a permanent artificial heart only when they…
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