The Best Australian Science Writing 2015 (30 page)

‘The Japanese helped develop the magnetic levitation system for us. But then we needed to put the pump together. Where do we go for that? Well, the guys in Germany have done that. So [Dan's long-time friend and Brisbane engineer] Nick Greatrex and I went over to Germany for a couple of years. We worked on their projects and they worked on ours and slowly, slowly, slowly we get it to a stage where it is semi-implantable.

‘Short-term animal testing was completed in Australia and Taiwan, but we reached a stage where we needed to evaluate the performance of the device in awake animals, and the best place in the world for this was, of course, Texas Heart Institute.'

Timms had completed some animal tests using an early version of the BiVACOR device when, in 2009, he was invited to discuss his work in a Paris auditorium with 350 of the world's leading cardiac surgeons, many of them dubious about the young Australian's ideas. He spoke nervously of his device's engineering ingenuity, its potential for transforming the global management of heart disease and, at the end of the talk, God stood up. ‘It was Bud Frazier,' says Dan. ‘He turns and says to the entire audience, “This is going to be the future of total artificial hearts”.'

In September 2011, Timms walked into Cohn's office at the Texas Heart Institute. Cohn's secretary had written a reminder of Timms' visit in his calendar: Daniel Timms from Australia. Artificial heart idea. ‘I see two new artificial heart ideas a month and 20 other ideas people have for me,' says Cohn. ‘By and large, most of it's shit. But you never know from where the next big thing is gonna come from so I see every one of them.

‘Daniel comes in. He's unshaven, a hole in his blue jeans, shirt untucked, with a backpack full of shit. He starts unloading it and talking about this stuff. I start, as I do, looking for what is tragically flawed about this. He starts talking about his levitation scheme and his balancing scheme and I start thinking, “God, that's kinda brilliant. Good Lord, who is this guy?”'

‘Where did you get this stuff?' Cohn asked.

‘It's just somethin' I came up with,' Dan said.

‘I ask who he's been working on this with and he tells me about this ragtag team of really brilliant people around the world who all have jobs elsewhere,' Cohn says. ‘He would fly out to their places, sleep on their couches, living on air. And I said, “Who's funding this?” He said, “Well, in the last ten years we have raised $600 000.”'

Cohn nodded. In one week, he raised $2.5 million for Dan's beatless artificial heart.

‘Mattress Mack!' Timms says, shaking his head, smiling, eyes alight.

Jim ‘Mattress Mack' McIngvale, founder of America's Gallery Furniture retail empire, had helped out Cohn before, when he'd been faced with an alarming shortage of gurneys for emergency patients. Cohn detailed the hospital's desperate predicament and, the next day, Mack delivered two dozen recliners and mattresses. Almost two decades later, Cohn and Frazier performed an emergency artificial implant on Mack's ailing brother, George, and Mack let his deep gratitude be known to Cohn: ‘If you ever need anything from me …'

‘Mack's only ever been in it for the patients,' Timms says. ‘A phenomenal man.'

‘We hit the ground running and over the last two years this device has made absurd progress,' says Cohn. ‘We've had cows jogging on a treadmill with greater outputs than any artificial heart has ever done.'

Cohn marvels at his Australian colleague, his smarts, his humility. Timms avoids publicity with almost superstitious intensity. ‘[If] you do it for a money hit or an ego boost then you forget the real reason you're doing it,' Timms says. ‘You start thinking you're clever, you're done.'

Cohn laughs, dismissing such humility. ‘I think we should be
shouting about this device from the rooftops,' he says. Because it's that good. ‘Anybody can sew the thing in,' Cohn says. ‘Not anybody can build it.'

* * * * *

It's 9 pm in the operating theatre in QUT's Medical Engineering Research Facility. Pure silence. After a six-hour operation, Timms' team of surgeons and engineers stands in mute awe, staring at the sheep sleeping on the operating table, breathing in and out, living without a pulse. Cardiac animal surgeon Steve Parnis points to a patch of wool deep beneath which Timms' titanium heart is miraculously calibrating itself 10 000 times a second in accordance to the animal's blood flow; the machine's perfect magnetically levitating single moving part spinning 2000 times per minute. The animal sleeps soundly, its natural heart completely discarded, beatless but not breathless. ‘That's something, isn't it?' says Cohn. ‘Where the heart should be is a device that has one moving part and the moving part is not touching anything. It's floating in a magnetic field, spinning like a top, by these complex magnetic forces. The spinning part will never wear out. It never touches anything. There's no mechanical wear. There's no friction.

‘But even though it is floating in a magnetic field it can shift along its axis of rotation. Whichever side it shifts to becomes more efficient. So it can balance systemic blood flow like no man-made device has ever done, and like your heart and my heart – the native mammalian heart – does brilliantly.'

For the team, this is a moment 15 years in the making. They've been here since 6 am this morning and nobody is going home until they watch the sheep open its eyes and stand. ‘This will be the first practical, mechanical, long-term replacement for the human heart,' says Cohn. ‘Daniel Timms and his team have
come up with a mechanism that makes an artificial heart balance like a native heart, which nobody has ever been able to do.'

Fraser's mile-wide smile is fixed in time. ‘This isn't research,' he says. ‘It's revolution. We just totally fucked over four billion years of evolution.'

‘A sheep without a heart being kept alive by a machine with one moving part,' says Cohn. ‘No pulse at all. Kinda makes you question what it is to be alive, right?'

* * * * *

Timms exits the operating theatre. He sits down for a moment, near the change rooms where six takeaway pizzas are going cold. He removes his surgeon's scrub hat, digests the past 15 hours, the past 15 years. ‘You wait 'til I tell my mum about this,' he says. ‘The first thing she'll say: “Imagine if your dad could see this.”'

The thought brings a tear to Timms' eye that he wipes away with his thumb, smiling. Truth is, the BiVACOR was born as much in his own heart as in his mind. It was built with things that science can't so easily explain: human connection, affection, love. It was built for his father. While Daniel's artificial heart was growing through the early and mid-2000s, his father Gary's warm and voluminous natural heart was dying; failing like 17 million human hearts around the world fail each year.

‘Dad was getting sicker and sicker,' Dan says. ‘I would think about him, Wouldn't it be good if he had another five years? Another ten years? What if we could create something that gives somebody an extra ten years of life? You could tick off your bucket list in ten years.'

Dan Timms went to work. He devoted every waking hour he had to making a machine that would give him ten more years on Earth with his best friend. ‘Dad ended up getting his heart valve replaced by surgeons up here at Prince Charles,' he says.
‘The surgeons and clinicians that brought me out here were the ones who were looking after my dad. These guys who had been involved with this thing for so long, they all would be doing their best to improve my dad's outcome.' When Gary's heart continued to fail and he was placed in intensive care, he was cared for by the very surgeons who had urged his son on through his medical quest because they'd seen so many people die before their eyes from heart failure.

Dan doubled, tripled his efforts. Not eating, not sleeping, only building, working himself to the point of exhaustion. ‘I was here in the lab working and it's literally two minutes' walk to ICU where they were looking after Dad,' he says. ‘When he was … aaahh …,' he struggles to find the words, ‘looking like he wasn't going that well … yeah … I spent two full months just working on this. It was a naive two months. Of course, there was no chance I could do it in that time. But there was a time in that period where I remember thinking, “It's just motivation.”'

Gary Timms never got the chance to see if his son's artificial heart design worked. He died, aged 55, of heart disease in the Prince Charles Hospital almost eight years ago.

Timms takes a deep breath, exhales. He's tired. Because it's nearing midnight and because he's been working 16-hour days for 15 years; because he's sacrificed everything – no wife, no kids, no definitive place to call home – to build the machine spinning 2000 revolutions per minute in the theatre next door.

There'll be more animal trials for the BiVACOR; human implants after that. He's intensely wary about claims of miracle breakthroughs and medical holy grails. Only after 500 men and women and children are living well and long with the BiVACOR inside their chests will he claim any kind of victory over Mother Nature. It's taken 15 years to get to the beginning. But there's a secret he can't contain anymore, a truth he can't avoid.

‘It works,' he says, nodding, full of heart, full of soul. ‘It works.'

Timms puts his surgeon's cap back on and enters the theatre, joins his team to stare at the sleeping sheep on the operating table. Forty minutes later, the sheep's right eye blinks twice, fully opens. Its head looks around, left, then right. It sucks on a stick of gooey molasses. Then it stands up. And those two words lit up beside the long night road of Daniel's endeavour explode into 17 million tiny flecks of gold.

How I rescued my brain

Will a statin a day really keep the doctor away?

Germ war breakthrough

Where's the proof in science?
There is none.

Geraint Lewis

As an astrophysicist, I live and breathe science. Much of what I read and hear is couched in language that to outsiders can seem little more than jargon and gibberish. But one word is rarely spoken or printed in science and that word is ‘proof '. In fact, science has little to do with ‘proving' anything.

These words may have caused a worried expression to creep across your face, especially as we're often told by the media that science proves things: serious things with potential consequences, such as ‘turmeric is a proven substitute for 14 common drugs', or more frivolous things, like ‘science has proved that mozzarella is the optimal cheese for pizza'.

But has science truly proved these things? Well, no.

The way of the mathematician

Mathematicians prove things, and this means something quite specific. Mathematicians lay out a particular set of ground rules, known as axioms, and determine which statements are true within the framework.

One of the best known of these is the ancient geometry of
Euclid. Over the last few millennia countless children have sweated to prove Pythagoras's relation for right-angled triangles, or that a straight line will cross a circle at two locations at most, or myriad other statements that are true within Euclid's rules.

Whereas the world of Euclid is perfect, defined by its straight lines and circles, the universe we inhabit is not. Geometrical figures drawn with paper and pencil are only an approximation of the world of Euclid where statements of truth are absolute.

Over the last few centuries we've come to realise that geometry is more complicated than Euclid allowed for, with mathematical greats such as Gauss, Lobachevsky and Riemann giving us the geometry of curved and warped surfaces.

In this non-Euclidean geometry, we have a new set of axioms and ground rules, and a new set of statements of absolute truth we can prove.

These rules are extremely useful for navigating around this (almost) round planet. One of Einstein's many great achievements was to show that curving and warping spacetime itself could explain gravity.

The mathematical world of non-Euclidean geometry is pure and perfect, and can therefore only ever be an approximation of our otherwise messy world.

What about science?

But there is mathematics in science, you cry. I just lectured on magnetic fields, line integrals and vector calculus, and I am sure my students would readily agree that there is plenty of maths in science.

And the approach is the same as other mathematics: define the axioms, examine the consequences.

Einstein's famous E=mc
²
, drawn from the postulates of how the laws of electromagnetism are seen by differing observers, his special theory of relativity, is a prime example of this.

But such mathematical proofs are only a part of the story of science.

The important bit, the bit that defines science, is whether such mathematical laws are an accurate description of the universe we see around us.