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Robert Jarvik, who developed the device implanted by University of Utah scientists into Barney Clark in 1982, will loan it to the D.C. museum

The pioneering artificial heart developed by Robert Jarvik will go on display at the Smithsonian Institution next month.

''As an item of historic interest, this is the only time the public has had a chance to look at it,'' Jarvik said of the heart first implanted by a University of Utah Health Sciences Center surgical team into the chest of Seattle-area dentist Barney Clark nearly a quarter century ago.

''Unfortunately, a lot of people who go see it would have been children at the time it was used,'' he commented in a telephone interview Thursday. ''A lot of years have gone by.''

Jarvik donated one of his newer artificial hearts to the National Museum of American History and is lending the museum the heart that kept Clark alive for 112 days.
Read entire article at Salt Lake Tribune