His Heart Whirs Anew

In fact, that's one of the reasons the heart scientists saw Houghton as a prime candidate for the first European clinical trial of their new technology.

He came to after the June 20, 2000, operation with a titanium turbine about the size of a C battery embedded in his dysfunctional left ventricle, the heart's main pumping chamber. It has only one moving part -- the impeller that moves his blood. If you listen to him with a stethoscope, you don't hear the usual loud tha-thump-thump pulse. What you hear is a whir. "Like a washing machine," he says helpfully, in one of numerous telephone interviews.

He also woke up with a titanium jack coming out of his head.

Getting power to a turbine in your chest is a life-and-death situation. Barney Clark, the first artificial heart recipient in 1982, was tethered to machinery the size of a clothes dryer. The question was whether you could make all that so portable that people could have "quality of life."

Houghton's batteries are compact enough that he carries them in a small camera bag. But if you want to get that power to the heart, you need to stretch the wire to a plug on your body that leads from the inside to the outside. The skull is a simple, safe site, though it has its price.

Someone once tried to steal his camera bag, and Houghton had to think fast and correctly to reconnect himself. Recently, "a woman in the supermarket came up and asked 'What's that thing in your head,' and brought her two children," he says. "It's not really depressing. Just something that happens a couple of times a month."

The real price of his tin heart, he says, was the shift in his spirit.

The heart has its reasons which reason knows nothing of.

-- Blaise Pascal

The new heart was a marvel. Soon Houghton was not only back on his feet, he was traveling the world, giving speeches, writing books, becoming chairman of the Artificial Heart Fund and engaging in a 91-mile charity walk. This all caused those who enthusiastically embrace bionic enhancement to hail Houghton -- part man, part machine -- as the model cyborg.

There were just these few nagging problems in the recesses of his soul.

"My emotions have changed. Somehow I can't help that," he says.