French scientist unveils $200,000 artificial heart

French scientist unveils $200,000 artificial heart

www.cnn.com

The device could save millions of lives and beats almost exactly like the real thing using electronic sensors to regulate heart rate and blood flow.

Developers Carmat, funded by the European space and defense group EADS, presented the device at a press conference in Paris on Monday.

Carmat's chief operating officer Patrick Coulombier told The Associated Press: "it's the same principle in the airplane as in the body."

(visit the link for the full news article)

Artificial heart. I guess this is a step towards everlasting life.
Sooner or later we'll see artificial lungs, livers, and kidneys. Damn at this pace I guess rich will will never die if they don't want to.

I see this as no different from organ harvesting from cloned humans and stem cell research.

This technology will only we available to the rich and powerful members of society. Maybe Alex Jones is right about a few superhuman elites ruling the world.


www.cnn.com
(visit the link for the full news article)



[edit on 11/2/2008 by die_another_day]

isnt it absolutely amazing what people are capable of creating? We can create life itself, in essence, by creating these things.

How crazy is that.

wow...

looking at this article makes me feel quite sick in many ways.

anyway, these super-powerful elites have a remarkable lack of personal power if they desire to carve eternal life through transforming their bodies into rotting mechanical monstrosities. their spirits will never flow into eternity, instead they'll stay discontent and savage looking to manipulate their possesions, their land, their food, their animals, their children, their slaves. they're sick and sad with all that money. lets hope they don't pull us all down with them as they destroy everything they knew fighting their downhill battle to achieve a twisted happiness.

life without death cannot be eternal.
life and death exist within eternity together.
there is your answer.

If I had one of those installed, I wouldn't be telling too many people about it, can you imagine the black market for one of those?

I mean there's already a body part market, a fully functioning artificial heart will be pretty easy to get out and will probably fetch a damn good price.





P.S. Its a bit morbid that that was the first thing to come to mind

Artificial eyes, ears, and tongues are things that I will allow =D.

Hearts? Nah.


Stem cell research and this all should be restricted to certain mechanisms.

The reason it's $200,000 is because think of all the research and technology that had to go into it. It would be nice if it could be available to everyone at launch, but they need to recover the developmental costs associated with it. Once the process becomes cheaper it will go down in price.

That is amazing for sure. Think about this...heart disease (correct me if I'm wrong) causes more death in the world than any other disease. Were these devices to become more affordable, the population could quite possibly explode.
There are definitely pros and cons to this.

This is not the first nor do I think it will be the last when it comes to artificial hearts. It would be nice if they had mechanical versions of many body parts like they did in the movie Bicentennial Man. Somehow though, I don't think that the PTB would want people living long lives.

when the DVD writer appeared in Europe (back in the 2000s I guess) it would cost 4000 euro for one unit. Now you can get a good one with 40. So I expect the artifficial heart would be 20 000 within 5 years