On December 12, 1957, a dog in a Cleveland Clinic laboratory lived for 90 minutes with a plastic heart pumping blood through its body. No human had ever survived that. Tetsuzo Akutsu built the device that made it possible, and spent the next fifty years chasing the moment it would work in a person.

The making of a pioneer: From Japan to Cleveland

Akutsu trained as a physician in Japan before joining Willem Kolff’s laboratory at the Cleveland Clinic in Ohio. Kolff, a Dutch-American physician was already known for inventing the artificial kidney. He had turned his attention to replacing the human heart. Akutsu became his closest collaborator on that effort, credited alongside Kolff as a father of artificial organs.

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Building the first artificial heart

Then they went further and built the entire organ. They built two pumps molded from a plastic cast of a real dog’s heart, connected to an air compressor through a plastic tube.

The design was tested on a lab bench first, then in a dead dog to check surgical fit, and finally in a living one. On that day in 1957, the implant kept the animal alive for 90 minutes before device complications ended the experiment, marking the first successful implant of a total artificial heart.

Akutsu didn’t stop there. Over the following decades he refined the design through institutions across the world, including Maimonides Medical Center, the University of Mississippi, the Texas Heart Institute, Japan’s National Cardiovascular Center, and Tokyo Medical and Dental University. Each version pushed the artificial heart closer to something a human could actually receive.

From lab bench to human patients

The first artificial heart in a human wasn’t implanted until 1969, by surgeon Denton Cooley in Texas. Akutsu’s own work bore its biggest fruit later. In 1981, at the Texas Heart Institute, Cooley’s team implanted the second artificial heart ever placed in a human being, one built on the foundation Akutsu had spent over two decades developing.

Colleagues who trained under him later described working alongside Akutsu as one of the defining experiences of their careers. They cited his professionalism and unwavering focus on the mission he and Kolff had started together in a Cleveland lab in the 1950s.

Tetsuzo Akutsu’s legacy in medicine

Akutsu died in 2007 at age 84. By then, artificial hearts had moved from a 90-minute experiment in a dog to a recognized bridge-to-transplant therapy used in hospitals worldwide. The device most associated with the field today carries the name of Kolff’s student Robert Jarvik, but the engineering path to it runs directly through the work Akutsu did first.

His collection of prototypes, molds, and casts, tracing the artificial heart from its first version in 1957 to permanent implants decades later, is preserved today as one of the most complete records of how a piece of the human body was rebuilt from plastic and air.

Quick facts about Tetsuzo Akutsu

• Joined Willem Kolff’s artificial heart team at the Cleveland Clinic in the 1950s
• Co-developed the total artificial heart that kept a dog alive for 90 minutes in 1957, the first successful implant of its kind in the US
• Completed 27 prior experiments implanting plastic heart valves in dogs before building the full artificial heart
• His research contributed directly to the second artificial heart implant in a human, performed in 1981
• Worked across institutions in the US and Japan, including the Texas Heart Institute and Tokyo Medical and Dental University
• Regarded, alongside Willem Kolff, as a founding figure of artificial organ research
  

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