Nonfiction: The Quest to Create and Perfect an Artificial Heart
These physicians include Cooley and his rival, Michael DeBakey, whose design Cooley supposedly stole. That artificial heart was an unwieldy honeydew melon-size piece of plastic that pumped blood using compressed air. Cooley’s protégé, Bud Frazier, continued the work of refining artificial hearts, eventually championing a design in which the device doesn’t pump so much as…