How a Brisbane plumber’s on designed the ultimate pump: an artificial hear

He whispered in a Scottish drawl: "You wanna see somethin' cool?" Professor John Fraser has been an intensive care specialist for two decades. He established the Critical Care Research Group at Brisbane's Prince Charles Hospital in 2004. He's seen cool things before: heart transplants; machines that can rebuild a blackened human lung before your eyes; bodies of children wrenched from the cold and still grip of beyond.

It was three years ago when he whispered the invitation, at a backyard barbecue at his house in Brisbane's northern suburbs. We were eating sausages, talking about outdoor music systems controlled by one's mobile phone. The things we humans can accomplish. Our wives went to school together. I'd known him for 13 years, long enough to know that when he asks if you would like to see something cool he's not about to show you a Harley-Davidson motorcycle….

The morning of January 8, 2015, and Dr Daniel Timms (Inventor and Co-Founder of BiVACOR) descends a set of stairs leading to an operating theatre in QUT's Medical Engineering Research Facility at Prince Charles Hospital. The 36-year-old slips into blue scrubs and enters the theatre where a team of heart surgeons, engineers and researchers from the hospital most of them volunteering their time will implant his BIVACOR artificial heart inside the sedated sheep resting on a steel operating table in the centre of the room.

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