Supercomputer simulations at NASA and the Pittsburgh Supercomputing Center honed the turbine designs to make them superhumanly efficient. For now, these pumps are used only as ''bridge'' devices to sustain a patient until a human heart is available for transplant. But researchers are confident they'll eventually be permanent replacements. Moreover, artificial organs no longer need a connection through the skin to an outside power source. In 1991, researchers at the University of Ottawa Heart Institute developed a so-called inductive system that ''broadcasts'' electrical power through the skin.
Patients can move about freely using a battery pack.
A similar system also transmitted signals through the skin, activating an artificial-vision brain implant. So blind people may not need a hole in their head like Jerry has. Americans who want Dobelle's system may have to fly to Zurich, where he has a clinic. The U.S. standard is that we're not going to use devices that might do harm, no matter how gravely ill the patient is,'' he says. To Kolff, who's now 89, that doesn't make sense, and he has been lobbying Washington for a change.