Word: pump
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Dates: during 1980-1989
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When Congress last December passed the 5?-per-gal. increase in the gasoline tax, designed to patch the nation's pothole-pocked highway system, it made a deal with the trucking industry. In addition to having to pay more at the pump beginning April 1, truckers found their highway-use taxes and registration fees raised, as of July 1984, from $240 a year to $1,600 for the largest rigs. As a palliative, Congress created rules to permit tandem-trailer trucks, some of them 40 tons in weight when loaded, unprecedented access to the interstate highway system and most...
...when it looked as though Clark would not see his wife again. He was in the final stages of cardiomyopathy, a progressive deterioration of the heart muscle. Clark's skin appeared blue from lack of oxygen, fluid was collecting in his vital organs, and his ravaged heart could pump only one liter of blood a minute, about one-seventh the normal rate. When Clark's heart started fluttering abnormally a day before the implantation was scheduled, DeVries decided the operation could not wait. His patient, he said, "probably would have been dead by midnight...
...that it tore "like tissue paper" during the operation. When the team, working to a recording of Ravel's Bolero, finally succeeded in replacing the organ with the mechanical device, said DeVries, "it was a spiritual experience for everyone in the room." But the new heart failed to pump properly, and a standby unit had to be substituted. Finally, after 7½ hr., Clark's heart output was normal, he had what was described as "the blood pressure of an 18-year-old," and his bluish skin was beginning to blush pink. Still, DeVries warned, "there are many...
...heart that Barney Clark received thus represented more than a quarter of a century of research. Like Kolff's original device, it is powered by air, compressed by an external electric pump. Two 6-ft.-long air tubes, which emerge from beneath the rib cage, connect the heart to the pump and to emergency tanks of compressed air and other equipment, all of which are stored on a cart. Total weight of the awkward external system...
Clark's experience will undoubtedly help doctors build a better heart. "We have learned more in a few months with Clark than in the past nine years with animals," says Larry Hastings, a U.M.C. heart-pump technician. Jarvik has already designed a portable drive system the size of a camera bag that can run the Utah heart for twelve hours. It may be ready by 1985. Researchers at the Cleveland Clinic, as well as Jarvik, are now working on hearts with implantable motors. In ten years, the only external apparatus needed by an artificial-heart patient...