Rebel Heart

This article discusses features and advantages of BiVACOR, an artificial heart machine. It also presents a brief overview of medical successes of Billy Cohn, a medical doctor. The BiVACOR heart is a rotary pump with a single moving part that consists of two impellers on a magnetically suspended rotor. Cohn along with his older brother built homemade gadgets, rocket engines, and a variety of incendiary devices in the garage. As Cohn progressed in his medical career, he never stopped tinkering. He was fast becoming one of the finest heart surgeons in the country, yet he spent his free time in his home workshop, prototyping medical devices to assist his operations. Cohn and O.H. ‘Bud’ Frazier, a cardiac surgeon who had performed more than 1000 heart transplants, led the work on AbioCor from the Texas Heart Institute in Houston and worked on a completely novel approach to artificial heart design—continuous flow. The heart, built by the two surgeons, is set out to build would replace those metaphorical flappy wings with fixed ones.