William DeVries - The First Patient

The First Patient

The first patient was a Seattle dental surgeon named Barney Clark, affected with an end-stage congestive heart failure. The seven-hour surgery was carried out in December 2, 1982, and it was successful. Doctor William DeVries, 38 years old at that time, was known to listen occasionally to rock music while performing surgery. In his first Jarvik-7 implant the operating room was hushed, except for the voice communications to the medical team and the quietly played strains of Ravel's"Bolero". The patient lived but DeVries found much harder to manage the device on a patient, rather than on a healthy animal. This carried to some complications which led part of the researchers to ask DeVries to turn off the device. In fact they did not want to lose the NIH approval and consequently their funds. DeVries refused to turn off the device, this caught the attention of the media, and made DeVries achieve the cover of magazine “Time” (December 10, 1984). Eventually, they had to deal with the issue of money. To keep mister Clark alive, he decided to sell the right of his story to a newspaper for one million dollars. Mister Clark lived for 112 days after the surgery, as complications kept occurring and this led to multiorgans failure and eventually death. Unfortunately mister Clark never recovered well enough to leave the hospital. In this period DeVries and his team had to face a series of issues due to the pressure of the media and the public. He was constantly obsessed with critics and legal issues concerning about what he was doing whether it was right or wrong. With the success of the first patient, DeVreis wanted to go on with his trials, but there were not enough funds and medical insurance was never going to pay for such an experimental transplant. Consequently DeVries found himself on a project for fund rising, which, at the beginning did not succeed until Wendell Cherry, vice chairman of the Humana Inc. offered him to relocate in Louisville (Kentucky); in exchange Cherry offered to finance the next 100 implants.