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Dr. Robert Jarvik, Inventor of First Human Artificial Heart, Dies at 79
- May 30, 2025
- I. Edwards HealthDay Reporter
FRIDAY, May 30, 2025 (HealthDay News) — Dr. Robert Jarvik, the man behind the world’s first permanent artificial heart used in a human, has died.
He was 79, The New York Times reported.
His wife, writer Marilyn vos Savant, said he died Monday at their home in Manhattan due to complications from Parkinson’s disease.
Jarvik is best known for designing the Jarvik-7, an artificial heart made of plastic and aluminum. It was implanted in Barney Clark, a 61-year-old retired dentist, on Dec. 2, 1982, at the University of Utah. The surgery was led by Dr. William C. DeVries.
Clark had severe heart disease and was weeks from death. He agreed to the risky surgery, hoping it might help others even if it didn’t save him.
During the seven-hour procedure, his heart muscle tore easily due to years of steroid treatment. After waking up, Jarvik told his wife, “Even though I have no heart, I still love you.”
Clark lived 112 days with the artificial heart, which was powered by a 400-pound air compressor. Though he never left the hospital, his case showed that humans could survive with a machine doing the heart’s work.
However, he suffered many complications, including seizures and kidney failure. Clark died from an infection on March 23, 1983.
Other early patients lived longer — William Schroeder survived 620 days, and Murray Haydon lived 488 days, The Times reported. Still, strokes and other side effects raised questions about quality of life.
The Jarvik-7 became a major topic of public interest. Some called it a medical breakthrough, while others raised ethical concerns about trying to replace the human heart.
By the mid-1980s, doctors and theologians were debating whether artificial hearts were helping patients or just extending suffering, The Times said.
Eventually, the U.S. Food and Drug Administration (FDA) stopped approving the Jarvik-7 in 1990 amid quality control concerns.
In a 1989 interview, Jarvik admitted he may have pushed too hard for widespread use of the device, calling it “probably the biggest mistake I have ever made.” But he stood by his work, saying “these were people who I view as having had their lives prolonged,” adding that they had survived as many as nine months when some had been expected to live “no more than a week.”
“I don’t think that kind of thing makes a person in medicine want to stop,” Jarvik said. “It just makes you all the more interested in working it through so it can be better.”
Robert Jarvik was born May 11, 1946, in Michigan and raised in Connecticut. His father was a family doctor.
Jarvik started college studying architecture at Syracuse University but turned to medicine after his father survived an aortic aneurysm.
He later earned degrees in zoology and biomechanics, and received his medical degree from the University of Utah in 1976, The Times reported.
“I knew that my father was going to die of heart disease, and I was trying to make a heart for him,” Robert Jarvik once said. “I was too late.”
Instead of practicing medicine, he focused on designing artificial hearts. One of his early models kept a cow alive for 268 days.
In 1985, Jarvik married writer Marilyn vos Savant, who was once listed in Guinness World Records as having the highest recorded IQ. He had two children from a previous marriage and is also survived by grandchildren and siblings.
In later years, Jarvik helped create smaller heart devices called ventricular assist devices, including the Jarvik 2000, about the size of a C battery, and a pediatric version, the Jarvik 2015, which is even smaller — about the size of an AA battery.
Although the original Jarvik-7 was eventually replaced, newer versions like the SynCardia Total Artificial Heart have been implanted in more than 1,700 people worldwide, mostly as a temporary solution while waiting for a transplant.
Jarvik received a lifetime achievement award in 2018.
“He had an agile mind,” Dr. O.H. Frazier, an innovator in heart surgery in Houston, told The Times, “and made a great contribution to the care of heart-failure patients.”
More information
Learn more about the Jarvik-7.
SOURCE: The New York Times, May 29, 2025
