Robert jarvik artificial heart

Robert Koffler Jarvik, inventor of the first permanently-implantable artificial heart, was born in Michigan on May 11, 1946.

Jarvik-7 artificial heart

He demonstrated his mechanical aptitude early, having invented such useful devices as a surgical stapler and other medical tools when he was just a teenager.

In 1964, Jarvik was a student at the University of Utah. His father became ill with heart disease and had to have open heart surgery.

That’s when Jarvik learned that many heart disease patients need heart transplants. In some cases, however, heart disease is so severe that a patient may not survive the wait for a donor heart. In an effort to help those patients to live as long as possible with the heart that they have, medical scientists had begun to develop electronic devices such as defibrillators, pacemakers, and artificial heart models.

Jarvik became very interested in medicine at that point, and he began to think about possible designs for artificial hearts that could help peop