For nearly 65 hours, an artificial heart beat within Haskell Karp's chest. Then, 30 hours after the 8-oz. plastic device was replaced by the heart of a 40-year-old woman, Karp died last week in Houston's St. Luke's Episcopal Hospital, succumbing to pneumonia and kidney failure. By becoming the first human recipient of a completely artificial heart, Karp had briefly raised all sorts of expectations the world over. His death immediately touched off an angry controversy over the wisdom of trying out the device without further experimentation. It also brought into the open a feud that has long simmered between two noted surgeons: Dr. Denton A. Cooley, who implanted the mechanical heart in Karp, and the equally famous Dr.Michael E. DeBakey.
Starkly Explicit. Cooley said that his decision to use the artificial heart, developed by Argentine-born Dr. Domingo Liotta, was made on the spur of the moment. "It was an act of desperation," Cooley admitted. "I was concerned, of course, because this had never been done before. But we had to put up one Sputnik to start the space program, and we had to start here some place."
The desperate moments began even before the controversial heart started pumping life back into Karp, 47, a printing estimator from Skokie, 111. Cooley warned Karp that if his badly damaged heart proved to be beyond repair, it might become necessary to use the experimental plastic device. Because the artificial heart is believed to cause serious damage to the blood if left in the body for too long, Cooley, along with Karp's family, issued a nationwide appeal for a human heart to replace it as quickly as possible. It was a starkly explicit appeal,calling for a person "with irreversible brain damage, good cardiac function and O-positive blood."
One potential donor, en route to the hospital by ambulance from Cleveland, Texas, died of a blood clot just a few blocks away; complications prevented use of her heart. Then Dr. Robert Lennon, a Lawrence, Mass, anesthesiologist, called Cooley to say that he had a suitable donor. Mrs. Barbara Ewan, who had suffered fatal brain damage, was considered medically dead (complete absence of brain waves for a period of 48 hours) when she arrived in Houston, but her heart had been kept beating with injections of stimulants. She suffered cardiac arrest just eight blocks from the medical center, and was re ceiving heart massage when she arrived.