Medicine by design

A friend of mine has the words "Quest for Immorality" in her MSN name. I started laughing. She was one of those people who read Harry Potter and thought alchemy was cool and whatnot (if you're not familiar with your Pb-to-Au stories...=P). But since Saturday, those words took a slightly different meaning...

This weekend, we attended a seminar series based on vision loss and the current research progress. I wasn't planning on going, but she listed off a few of the seminar topics, one which caught my attention immediately. The research into the mind-machine interface.

I think I'm really fortunate to have a set dream like I do. This weekend, as I was listening to Dr Syed go on about brain cells growing on Si chips and how they're probing from signals to and from the cells...I was like wow. This is biomed engg (BME) at work...the stuff I want to be doing! And so at the end, he gave us a inspirational speech about research and doing stuff not for money but become immortalized through your work like the great scientists in the past...

I think, between my random visits up to Unit 100 and seeing the stroke patients just sitting in beds...or reading of stories of how BME devices like the pacemaker or the heart-lung machine helped many many people...I realized we really still have a long way to go. A long way before we can produce a mechanical replacement for the human heart. Before we can regenerate a spinal cord.

To many, the heart is something that's there. You don't think much of it, it just works. To others, it's a fully automated pump, pushing thousands of litres of blood around. To others, it is a critical piece that's keeping them alive. This is the mechanical description of what it takes to replace a human heart (my explanations in brackets):

The device had to be durable enought to beat 40 million times a year, for at least two to three years (I have no idea how much punishment a car takes...some mechie needs to help me here). It had to be nontoxic and made of materials that could survive the corrosive saline environment of the human body (salt and water, which is what saline is, rusts common metals, destroying the machine). It had to pump blood at a velocity and volume roughly similar to those of a normal heart, which averages between 6 to 10 liters per minute (a toilet moves around 6 litres per flush. Imagine flushing a toliet every minute. lol). It had to pump blood without damaging delicate red blood cells (I've never stuck my hand in a toliet before, but I'm pretty it's pretty turbulent there...). It had to have an ample supply of power and, perhaps most critical, had to sit in the body and do its work without causing blood clots, which could be fatal (traveling bloodclots gets stuck in smaller arteries, which could cause strokes).

- Medicine by Design by Fen Montaigne

Amusingly, I know better the biological aspect to this than the mechanical or electrical aspect. It's crazy how complicated this 0.35kg piece of muscle is. But then, that's cuz God is a crazy engineer. We've done much to advance medicine. But we still have a long ways to go. As I write this, I'm remembering that poster I saw in the BHSc cafe...People are warzones. And no one said this is going to be an easy war. Somewhere, this Book tells me I need to be fighting for people's hearts. Wouldn't it be crazy if we can offer them new ones in exchange for their broken ones?

lol. Having worked in the lab for almost two terms now, I know the field isn't this glorious. But the reward is great. It's great indeed. I wonder how much Christian BMEs, doctors, nurses, researchers, physiotherapists, psychiatrists, councilors...etc...are out there...knowing that we're trying to not only fight for their physical and mental life, but also their spiritual ones too.