He worked with a team at the University of Utah to create a mechanical heart. It was later used in patients awaiting an organ transplant.
Dr. Robert K. Jarvik, the principal designer of the first permanent artificial heart implanted in a human — a procedure that became a subject of great public fascination and fierce debate about medical ethics — died on Monday at his home in Manhattan. He was 79.
His wife, the writer Marilyn vos Savant, said the cause was complications of Parkinson’s disease.
In 1982, the U.S. Food and Drug Administration gave the University of Utah permission to implant what was designed to be a permanent artificial heart in a human. On Dec. 2 that year, Dr. William C. DeVries led the pioneering surgical team that implanted the Jarvik-7 model, made of aluminum and plastic, in a 61-year-old retired Seattle dentist, Barney B. Clark.
Dr. Clark at first declined to receive the Jarvik-7, Dr. DeVries was quoted as saying in a 2012 university retrospective, but he changed his mind on Thanksgiving after he had to be carried by a son to the dinner table. Dr. Clark’s chronic heart disease had left him weeks from death. If the surgery didn’t work for him, he told doctors, maybe it would help others.
During the seven-hour surgery, according to the retrospective, Dr. Clark’s heart muscle tore like tissue paper as it was removed after so many years of being treated with steroids.
Upon awakening, Dr. DeVries said, Dr. Clark told his wife, Una Loy Clark, “I want to tell you even though I have no heart, I still love you.”
