Ticker: The Quest to Create an Artificial Heart

267 Pages·2018·6.67 MB·English

by  Mimi Swartz

More Acclaim for Ticker
“A fast-paced, utterly riveting tale of the decades of effort that have gone into developing an artificial heart.
The characters, many of whom dedicated their lives to this quest, are captivating, and their rivalries are the
stuff of legend.”
—Bethany McLean, coauthor of All the Devils Are Here and The Smartest Guys in the Room
“A remarkable journey through the harrowing world of heart surgery, as a brilliantly gifted and eccentric
team of doctors work to develop a complete artificial heart to save the thousands of patients a year whose
hearts are failing.”
—Bryan Burrough, author of Public Enemies, The Big Rich, and Barbarians at the Gate
“An exciting, propulsive, and at times surprisingly tender account of the swashbuckling surgeons and
inventive geniuses who are working to achieve one of the greatest medical breakthroughs—the
development of the artificial heart. Mimi Swartz has done an outstanding job and uncovered the human
story behind the triumph of technology.”
—Jennet Conant, New York Times bestselling author of Tuxedo Park and 109 East Palace
“Who knew that the story of the artificial heart was such a rip-roaring one, with one larger-than-life
character after another, and plot twists galore? In Ticker, Mimi Swartz has told that story with verve and
elegance, and brought those characters to vivid life. A wonderful work of nonfiction by a wonderful
nonfiction writer.”
—Joe Nocera, Bloomberg News columnist and author of Indentured: The Inside Story of the Rebellion
Against the NCAA

Copyright © 2018 by Mimi Swartz All rights reserved.
Published in the United States by Crown, an imprint of the Crown Publishing Group, a division of Penguin
Random House LLC, New York.
crownpublishing.com
CROWN and the Crown colophon are registered trademarks of Penguin Random House LLC.
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Names: Swartz, Mimi, author.
Title: Ticker : the quest to create an artificial heart / Mimi Swartz.
Description: New York : Crown, [2018] | Includes bibliographical references and index.
Identifiers: LCCN 2017058910 | ISBN 9780804138000 (hardback) | ISBN 9780804138017 (ebook)
Subjects: | MESH: Frazier, O. Howard. | Cohn, Billy. | Heart, Artificial | Surgeons | United States
Classification: LCC RD598.35.T7 | NLM WG 169.5 | DDC 617.4/120592—dc23 LC record available at
https://lccn.loc.gov/2017058910
ISBN 9780804138000
Ebook ISBN 9780804138017
Cover design by Christopher Brand Cover photograph: The Voorhes v5.3.1
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To my father, husband, and son
Who taught me the most important lessons of the human heart
Diseases desperate grown
By desperate appliance are relieved, Or not at all.
—WILLIAM SHAKESPEARE, Hamlet, Act 4, Scene 3
“How about my heart?” asked the Tin Woodman.
“Why, as for that,” answered Oz, “I think you are wrong to
want a heart. It makes most people unhappy. If you only knew it,
you are in luck not to have a heart.”
“That must be a matter of opinion,” said the Tin Woodman.
“For my part, I will bear all the unhappiness without a murmur,
if you will give me the heart.”
—FRANK BAUM, The Wizard of Oz
CONTENTS
Cover
Title Page
Copyright
Dedication
Epigraph
Prologue: THE TIN MAN
1: THE WIZARD, 2015
2: HOW HARD COULD IT BE?
3: THE MAKING OF A SURGEON
4: A TOUR OF HELL
5: THE WAR AT HOME
6: THE PURLOINED HEART
7: EXPERIMENTS
8: BARNEY WHO?
9: THE PRISONER
PHOTO INSERT
10: THE WILDERNESS
11: SYNCHRONICITY
12: THE KING OF DISTRACTION
13: HEARTMATES
14: THE AUSTRALIAN GUY
15: MATILDA
16: THE OCCUPATION
17: THE POWER SOURCE
18: THE DREAM OF ETERNAL LIFE
Acknowledgments
Notes
Selected Bibliography
About the Author
Prologue
THE TIN MAN
The kids fell in love with him first. Craig Lewis lived three houses down, a tall,
solitary beanpole of a man with a copper-colored golden retriever named
Shogun. He looked to be in his late thirties, and Linda Sanders knew from
neighborhood gossip that he had one marriage behind him, just like she did.
Back then, Shogun seemed to be his constant companion. Craig had taught that
dog to do just about anything—of course he could sit, stay, fetch, and hunt, but
he also knew how to play hide-and-seek with even the canniest kid. That was
why, as soon as Linda Sanders’ children heard Craig’s pickup pull into his
driveway in the early evenings, they were out the door—Leslie was eight and
Eddie six, two towheads on the run, raising small clouds of dust as their feet
slapped the parched summer grass. “Don’t wear out your welcome!” Linda
warned to the screen door they slammed behind them. The sky would turn dusky
and the shadows grow long before she’d give up waiting for their return and
head down after them.
The last light of day was at her back, heating her neck and shoulders, and the
hot, damp closeness of a Houston summer took her in its seasonal embrace.
There were people who swore it always cooled off at night here, but Linda knew
better. She’d lived all her life in this tattered north Houston neighborhood, and
she knew what changed and what didn’t, or couldn’t.
Linda could see from the flattened grass that her kids had literally beaten a
path to Craig’s door. It was natural that they’d go looking for a man to replace
the one who’d left them. Craig was handy, that was for sure: when Eddie
dragged his broken bike to his door, he fixed the chain, cleaning it up with
WD40. He let Leslie draw in his old sketchbooks. If the kids were talking about
the moon or stars, he would haul out his telescope and let them look through it at