Billy Cohn and Bud Frazier are doctors from the Texas Heart Institute, though their work may require them to change the name.
The short film Heart Stop Beating by Jeremiah Zagar shows you can live without a heart or a pulse. The turbine-like device implanted in Craig Lewis does not beat like a heart, but rather provides a continuous flow like a garden hose. Lewis was a 55-year-old, dying from amyloidosis - build-up of abnormal proteins. The proteins clog the organs so much that they stop working, but after the operation, his replacement, "heart" machine keeps blood flowing through his body.
If you put a stethoscope to his chest, no heartbeat or pulse can be heard - there's just a humming sound. "By all criteria that we conventionally use to analyze patients”, Doctor Cohn said, "he is dead".
Yet even without the telltale signs of regular human physiology, there is life.
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