Back when the first Jarvik heart was put together my engineering response was identical to the comedian Jerry Seinfelds. The punch line was “Next thing you know you wake up permanently attached to some luggage”.  It literally was the size of a piece of luggage with a vacuum cleaner hose going into the chest. At the time I remember thinking that it was stupid to remove the heart to do this. I could see that augmentation of the pumping capacity of the diseased heart would be alot more natural fit.
The Jarvik 2000 is used as an augmentation to what is left of the native hearts ability to pump blood. I saw a fellow on the Discovery Channel who was doing pretty well with it. Settings are walk, run and turbo. This is just the beginning. Its part of the process discribed by Ray Kurzweil in “The Singularity is Near”.  Nanotechnology will make this look like the model T soon.
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