Heart Kept Beating Outside of Body

defence budget writes "CNN has a report about a human heart that was kept beating on its own outside a body during a test of a new medical device. Perhaps the success could be replicated for the Brain as well? (A 'living' computer?!)"

Comments

canned goods

[Scrameustache]

Well, the article says that they expect to be able to keep the heart beating 24 hours after removal from the body, and that an iced heart will last 6 hours.

Is that cummulative? can they add the two techniques and keep the heart "fresh" for 30 hours total? This is good news for transplant hopefulls.

the important thing

[oliphaunt]

is of course that they were able to do something useful with the heart afterwards.

I'd like to point out that the average mammalian heart will keep beating of its own accord for several minutes after it has been removed from a living body. The normal heart has a set of electrodes, called the sinoatrial node and the atrial ventricular node, which broadcast electrical impulses to coordinate the simultaneous contraction of the heart muscle. Read all about it here.

I remember this because of a rat vivisection lab in sophomore biology. We opened that sucker up, and cut its heart out while it was still beating, and dropped the heart (it was about the size of a garbanzo bean) into a 100-mL beaker full of saline. The heart functioned like a little underwater jet-ski, pumping itself around the inside of the beaker for a good 5 minutes after it had been removed from its host.

the point is that the heart wants to keep on beating for a while...