SALT LAKE CITY — It’s a story of ingenuity, genius, and heart… literally.
Forty-two years ago, Utah became the site of the first successful total artificial heart transplant, a groundbreaking achievement that has since paved the way for hundreds of thousands of lives to be changed.
Today at the University of Utah, the legacy of that moment is still alive and celebrated.
Dr. Craig Selzman, surgical director of the Heart Transplant Program at U of U Health, knows the story well, and for him, it’s a legacy he lives every day. “Every day’s a little bit different,” he said, adding, “Last night, I did a double lung transplant and a heart transplant.”
The origin of the artificial heart, however, is more than just a medical milestone. “The story of the total artificial heart is like a PBS, ten-part, documentary-length kind of deal,” Selzman remarked with a laugh.
Though the University of Utah is proud to claim its place in history, its beginnings go back decades before the 1982 surgery. “We want to take some credit here at the University of Utah, but it didn’t start here,” he explained. The national push toward this kind of medical innovation began as a federal initiative championed by President John F. Kennedy.
The vision attracted talent from across the country, including bioengineer Willem Kolff, best known for developing the dialysis machine, who moved from Cleveland to the University of Utah in 1967.
Kolff was joined by a new wave of ambitious doctors to take his innovations and use them for any number of medical advancements, one of them being Robert Jarvik. Selzman describes him simply by saying, “However you define the word, in his little world, he was a genius.”
Jarvik became the driving force behind refining the idea of a total artificial heart and making it a viable reality, with multiple prototypes being developed into the final form, the Jarvik 7. “Design is simple, but implementation of the design is a whole different thing,” Selzman noted
By late 1982, the team believed they were ready, and that December, Barney Clark, a dentist suffering from end-stage heart failure, became the first recipient.
They had their device and their patient, but to complete the journey, they needed a surgeon. That’s where Dr. William DeVries entered the picture as the final piece of the puzzle.
“Dr. DeVries, who was the surgeon at the time, they all worked together, and in the middle of the night put in one of these things,” Selzman remembered.
Clark lived for 112 days — an achievement that was unprecedented. The surgery, performed at the University of Utah Medical Center, drew worldwide attention. “At the time, it was like, it was a wow moment. Bill DeVries was on the cover of Time magazine. you know, it was a wow moment.”
Looking back, Selzman brought out one of the original prototypes to show just how modest the device looked, and while the design may seem primitive compared to today’s medical devices, its impact was transformative.
“This pump has been re-jiggered a little bit, but it’s still being put in to this day,” he said as the technology also informed a wave of future advancements.
Jarvik himself later developed a partial artificial heart known as the Left Ventricular Assist Device (LVAD), which is where he and Dr. Selzman met each other.
He recalled he always “put patients first,” even when his livelihood was the machines he built.
I asked Selzman if he was confident that those later achievements would not have been possible without Utah’s groundbreaking work. “Absolutely not. You needed this.” He said
As the now surgical director of the University of Utah's Cardiac Mechanical Support and Heart Transplant program and the Lung and Heart/Lung Transplant program, Dr. Selzman lives that innovation every day at the U and beyond the technology. Selzman believes the effort reflects something Uniquely Utah — a willingness to be bold in medicine.
“I think people were trying to be bold. Like, it was a bold move in the ’50s and ’60s to say we’re going to take over the function of the heart.”
Decades later, the first artificial heart transplant is still considered one of the defining moments in both Utah’s medical history and in cardiovascular care worldwide.“It is considered a wow moment,” Selzman concluded.
Unfortunately, Dr. Robert Jarvik passed away earlier this year from Parkinson's disease at his home in New York at the age of 79.
