How science is opening up the mysteries of the heart, revealing the poetry in motion within the machine.
Your heart is a miracle in motion, a marvel of construction unsurpassed by any human-made creation. It beats 100,000 times every day—if you were to live to 100, that would be more than 3 billion beats across your lifespan. Despite decades of effort in labs all over the world, we have not yet been able to replicate the heart’s perfect engineering. But, as Sian Harding shows us in The Exquisite Machine, new scientific developments are opening up the mysteries of the heart. And this explosion of new science—ultrafast imaging, gene editing, stem cells, artificial intelligence, and advanced sub-light microscopy—has crucial, real-world consequences for health and well-being.
Harding—a world leader in cardiac research—explores the relation between the emotions and heart function, reporting that the heart not only responds to our emotions, it creates them as well. The condition known as Broken Heart Syndrome, for example, is a real disorder than can follow bereavement or stress. The Exquisite Machine describes the evolutionary forces that have shaped the heart’s response to damage, the astonishing rejuvenating power of stem cells, how we can avoid heart disease, and why it can be so hard to repair a damaged heart. It tells the stories of patients who have had the devastating experiences of a heart attack, chaotic heart rhythms, or stress-induced acute heart failure. And it describes how cutting-edge technologies are enabling experiments and clinical trials that will lead us to new solutions to the worldwide scourge of heart disease.
Author(s): Sian E. Harding
Publisher: The MIT Press
Year: 2022
Language: English
Pages: 232
City: Cambridge
Contents
1 Introduction
2 Threats to the Heart: A Thousand Natural Shocks
Class, Status, and Survival
Health Inequality Begins Before Birth
Adding Insult to Injury
You Are What Your Mother Ate
Victims of Our Own Success
A Constellation of Complications
3 The Science of the Really Small
It Lives! It Lives!
Harnessing the Power of the Cardiomyocyte
Setting the Rhythm
The Orchestra Plays!
The TheatRE of Biology
Seeing without Light
The Lonely Cardiomyocyte
The Marvelous Machine
4 Big Data—Many Hearts That Beat as One?
Strength in Numbers
The Story of a Life
Location, Location, Location
Natural Living—Humans in the Wild
Deep Data—a Universe within a Cell
Data Deluge and the Artificial Mind
5 The Plastic Heart
Athletes vs. the Rest of Us
Extreme Athletes—Too Much of a Good Thing?
An Uphill Struggle
Patterns of Disease
It Takes a Village
6 The Responsive Heart—Emotion in Motion
Your Secret Control Network
Your Heart Can Tell You How to Feel
Running for Your Life—the Starting Gun!
What Makes You Stronger Can Kill You as Well
Dying from a Broken Heart
The Species vs. the Individual
Should I Take Drugs to Block Adrenaline—Just in Case?
7 Can You (Not) Die of a Broken Heart?
A Missed Penalty Kick
Takotsubo—a New Broken Heart Syndrome
Sex, Drugs, and Rock ’n’ Roll
Of Hot Mice and Men
Takotsubo and Sudden Cardiac Death— Two Sides of the Same Coin
What Can We Learn from Takotsubo Syndrome?
Who Will Get Takotsubo?
What’s Next for the Takotsubo Patient? First Do No Harm
8 The Gendered Heart
Sex, Hormones, and Social Conditioning in Heart Disease
Genes and Sex
Stewing in the Hormone Soup
Mixing the HRT Cocktail
The Invisible Woman
The Hysterical Woman
9 The Mechanical Heart
Keeping Up the Rhythm
Messages from the Heart
The Impossible Machine
The Gift of Life
10 Can Stem Cells Help Us Grow a New Heart?
The Healing Body—Stem Cells and You
Mix and Match?
The Therapeutic Stem Cell
Turning Back the Clock on the Heart
Own-Brand or Designer Label?
Problem #1: The Blood of Virgins Again?
Problem #2: Sorry, Your Heart Is in the Mail
Problem #3: Show Me the Money
11 When Will the Future Be Here?
The Drugs Do Work
The Gene Genie
Battles at the Cutting Edge of Gene Therapy
Muscle for the Heart
Personalized Stem Cells— the Clinical Trial in a Dish
Acknowledgments
Notes
Chapter 1
Chapter 2
Chapter 3
Chapter 4
Chapter 5
Chapter 6
Chapter 7
Chapter 8
Chapter 9
Chapter 10
Chapter 11
Index
