25 July

Australia will win gold medals in Paris. But none of those athletes will come within light years of achieving what Australian biomedical engineer Daniel Timms has done. I posted about him once before. Here he is, holding the artificial heart he invented. It’s made of titanium, so the body won’t reject it. It has only one moving part, a levitating magnetic metal disc, that floats inside it, touching nothing except blood. Doctors are hoping it can be a permanent heart replacement, for those with heart failure. Previously artificial hearts failed inside a year, and even the better ones were seen only as a temporary thing, until a transplant could be found. One of the senior doctors working with it says it will pump until ‘the sun no longer exists’. It’s that good. It can pump with or without pulsatile motion i.e. continuously, or in ‘pulses’, as our hearts do. Nobody is sure whether we even need a pulse, it may just be a feature of our muscular hearts that this one doesn’t need (though it can do that too). It can be implanted in children, women and men. Daniel’s dad was a plumber, who died in his 50s of heart failure. They worked on the original idea together, but it came too late to save him. These are now being put into actual patients in clinical trials. Everybody has their fingers crossed the trials will go well, the animal trials have been superb. Smart is the only true sexy. Fuck this is smart. I’m at a stage in my life where I’m very intolerant of stupidity standing in the way of improving our lives, and unapologetically so.