At a Mass General perfusion lab, a push to make more and more hearts viable for transplant

It seems like organized chaos. Five lab members move around a room the size of a galley kitchen. On this day, three high school students also squeeze into the medical lab, closely peering at a pig heart barely beating in a box. Tubes connected to the heart from a rhythmic, speaker-like pump push warm red blood cells through its chambers. It looks like a scene out of Frankenstein.

The heart, which had been kept cold in a liquid bath for about six hours before it was re-animated, appears to be pumping. But not as vigorously as it should. Only the right side of the heart is working, while the left side is still. One of the lab members is massaging the heart to coax the left side into working. She then injects epinephrine into the heart. Eventually, she tries using paddles to shock the heart. After almost two hours, the team calls it. The experiment did not work.

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