The first human implantation had been done in 1969, by a surgeon named Denton Cooley, of the Texas Heart Institute, in Houston. Timms started reading about the history of the artificial heart. They bought tubes, pipes, and valves at the hardware store and, in their garage, constructed a crude approximation of the circulatory system. It was only natural that he and his dad would work together on a heart. Theirs was a tinkering, experimenting household as a kid, Timms and his father had spent countless afternoons in the back yard building an elaborate system of fountains, ponds, and waterfalls. Gary was a plumber, and Timms’s mother, Karen, was a high-school science assistant. Heart failure is a progressive condition-a person can live for years while his heart slowly gives out. At first, the problem seemed to be a faulty valve soon they learned that Gary’s entire heart was failing.

He was searching for a dissertation topic when his father, Gary, who was fifty, suffered a massive heart attack.

A graduate student in biomedical engineering, he was living with his parents in Brisbane, Australia. Daniel Timms started working on his artificial heart in 2001, when he was twenty-two years old.

Instal the new Heart Box