The April 20 Edition

I first heard about a new artificial heart just over a year ago, when I was hosting a panel discussion on developments in cardiac disease treatment for the St Vincent’s Curran Foundation, which raises funds for St Vincent’s Hospital Sydney. Professor Chris Hayward was on the panel, and he talked about the new device and its potential to transform how cardiologists like him respond when this most fundamental of organs fails. He spoke, too, about how it had been designed by an Australian. The next morning I rushed into the office and told senior writer Amanda Hooton about it. What a great story, we both thought. Then we hit a roadblock: nobody would want to talk publicly about the new heart until it was ready to be implanted into a human. And nobody could say when that would be. What they could say was that it would happen first in the US. And that when it happened, it would be huge international news. The solution was for Amanda to start the story anyway, dropping in and out of it over many months as she found more and more people willing to talk about it. Today, finally, her piece appears. Has Timms’ device gone into a human yet? Not when this magazine went to print. But by the time you are reading this? Who knows. Editor, Katrina Strickland