About a thousand U.S. cardiac patients die every year because their failing hearts give out before they are able to receive transplants. In October, the U.S. Food and Drug Adminis­tration approved an artificial heart, developed by SynCardia Systems of Tucson, AZ, that could keep patients alive in the hospital for a few more months until transplants become available. Since the 1950s, researchers have struggled to develop a safe artificial heart. Now SynCardia has come up with the first FDA-approved "bridge-to-transplant" device to replace the whole heart. In a recently published study, 79 percent of patients on the heart survived to transplantation, compared to 46 percent of control patients. Here at the University Medical Center in Tucson, medical staff begin an operation to replace a patient's dying heart with an artificial one.

Heart Man: Jack Copeland, head of cardiovascular and thoracic surgery at the University of Arizona Sarver Heart Center in Tucson, leads the surgery.