Don't Save Anything: The Uncollected Writings of James Salter(36)
“Well, I think it was a good thing to do it. Sport makes character,” he says. I walk back to the hotel. It’s barely nine o’clock. The early skiers are walking past me up toward the cable car. The day is beginning to take on winter brilliance, the snow sparkling, faces animated and bright.
“Did you do it? Did you go down with Sailer? How was it?” It will be true one day even if it isn’t now. “The greatest run of my life,” I say and go upstairs and back to bed.
The New York Times
November 7, 1982
At the Foot of Olympus: Jarvik, Kolff, and DeVries
When Robert Jarvik, the designer of the artificial heart, came to Salt Lake City in 1971 to go to work at the Institute for Biomedical Engineering which is part of the University of Utah there, he and his young wife were able to drive west with all of their possessions loaded in the back of their car. The Institute itself was then four years old, Jarvik was twenty-five, and Willem Kolff, for whom Jarvik over the next decade was going—unbeknownst to him at the time—to design and build a whole series of artificial hearts, was sixty. Neither man had met the other, they had only talked on the phone. When Jarvik arrived, Kolff called him into his office, which was in an old, converted World War II barracks, and told him simply that his job would be to make an artificial heart.
“That’s all he said,” Jarvik recalls. He doesn’t remember precisely how he went about it. His only preconception was that it “ought to be heart-shaped,” so the first heart he made was shaped like that.
Jarvik did not invent the artificial heart. There were many models before his. The search had been going on for about forty years and in the imagination of men much longer. The problem is quite simple: the heart, as many authorities have observed, is merely a pump. But what a pump. “This moves of itself,” as Da Vinci wrote, “and does not stop unless forever. Marvellous instrument invented by the supreme Master.” Governed by a faint electrical impulse, by glandular action, and by a dictum called Starling’s Law (the volume of blood pumped by the heart depends on the volume returned by the veins which dilate in times of emotion or stress to increase the flow to the heart and hence its output), this most crucial organ is entirely muscle, weighs less than a pound, and beats tirelessly over 3 billion times between birth and death, unnoticed, uncared for, while we eat, dream, love, and pray. In an age of tremendous scientific discovery the heart has remained a kind of holy grail.
Although he had never built an artificial heart or even considered the problem, Jarvik was nevertheless a good choice for the job. The son of a Connecticut doctor, he had shown an aptitude for making things since early childhood and in high school he designed a surgical stapler, an instrument like a pair of graceful scissors meant to be held in one hand and to save time by clipping closed severed blood vessels during an operation. He continued to think about this device for years. The first time she went out with him in college, Elaine Jarvik recalls, he was talking about it. The history of the stapler is in a way the history of his life, connecting the various segments of it in a remarkable manner.
Unable to get into medical school in the states, Jarvik and his wife—they were married the day before they left—went to Italy where he entered the University of Bologna. He spent two years there. It was a difficult period. Neither he nor his wife spoke much Italian and they led what they describe as a hermetic existence.
“I didn’t go to class very much,” he says. “It was kind of an intolerable situation. It was very, very crowded.” For the anatomy course the students would begin to gather in a courtyard an hour before class.
When the gates were opened everyone would rush into the building and down a long corridor lined with display cases containing thousands of skulls. “I refused to run. After a while I just stopped going and stayed home and studied.”
He worked on the stapler there, however, and also when he returned to the States. He had come back still hoping to get into medical school here. Although Bologna was the oldest university in Italy with a medical school dating back to 1306, there was virtually no lab work—they couldn’t obtain cadavers—and his father had arranged to have him do dissections at NYU. Jarvik showed the stapler to various people there, including a professor interested in biomechanics who promptly offered him a fellowship.
“I took it hoping that it would lead me to medical school at NYU,” Jarvik says. “I got on the waiting list that year but I didn’t get in.”
He got a master’s degree in biomechanics, and the next summer an executive of a surgical instrument company that was interested in the stapler, having failed in an attempt to help Jarvik get into Duke, called someone he knew in Utah, a Dutch doctor named Kolff who was head of a biomedical institute there. The idea was to have Kolff hire Jarvik. As a resident of Utah, he would have a better chance to be admitted to medical school there. The executive even offered to pay Jarvik’s salary but Kolff, who was struggling to get his institute established, did not seem interested. Finally Jarvik called himself to plead for the job. He was advised to return to Bologna and get his degree. That was not what he wanted, Jarvik said, he wanted to work for Kolff.
“Do you have a car?” Kolff asked unexpectedly.
Jarvik said he had a Volvo.
“Oh, I see my administrator through the window,” Kolff interrupted, adding, “How much money do you want?”