Ticker: the quest to create an artificial heart

In Ticker, Texas Monthly executive editor and two-time National Magazine Award winner Mimi Swartz takes readers behind the scenes of perhaps the greatest medical and technological quest of our time, as she follows pioneering heart surgeon O.H. "Bud" Frazier and his partner, Dr. Billy Cohn, in Frazier's lifelong effort to develop, perfect, and successfully implant an artificial heart in patients whose hearts are failing. In Ticker, renowned journalist Mimi Swartz takes readers on an incredible behind-the-scenes journey into a heart surgeon's epic quest to develop an artificial heart--a reliable, implantable device that would extend the lives of patients who have no other recourse. As director of cardiovascular surgery at the Texas Heart Institute, and arguably the foremost heart surgeon in the world, Bud Frazier's lifelong mission, since his stint in the war in Vietnam, has been to save lives by creating an artificial heart for those whose hearts are failing. There are 50,000 people on the waiting list for a heart transplant at any given time, with fewer than 2,500 transplants performed each year. Chronicling the evolution of cardiac medicine, from pioneering efforts in open heart surgery and bypass operations under Michael DeBakey and Denton Cooley, to the advent of valve replacement and heart transplants, and protege Bud Frazier's introduction of the Left Ventricle Assist Device (or LVAD) that Vice President Cheney used for a decade before his successful heart transplant, Swartz follows Frazier and his partner Billy Cohn as they feverishly design, develop, and test new heart designs"--Provided by publisher.
Swartz shows just how hard it can be to replicate nature's greatest creation-- a human heart. Part investigative journalism, part medical mystery, she covers fifty years of false starts, abysmal failures, and miraculous triumphs, as experienced by one of the world's foremost heart surgeons, O.H. "Bud" Frazier. At the Texas Heart Institute, the roadblocks to success-- medical setbacks, technological shortcomings, government regulations-- are immense. Swartz follows the history of heart surgery, the first heart transplant, and the artificial heart while following Frazier's quixotic quest.