The Exquisite Machine: The New Science of the Heart

Sian E. Harding

Sep 2022 · MIT Press

About this ebook

INSIDE THE MYSTERIES OF THE HEART: See your heart in a whole new way as a leading cardiac scientist reveals astonishing insights on heart function, heart health, and heart disease.

“Our blood-pumping organ and its impressive tricks deserve all our cartoon-heart emoji." —The Boston Globe

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.

Ratings and reviews

Growing up with a mother who was a heart patient all her life and having many relatives coping with different heart conditions, I was somewhat familiar with some of the general heart conditions in our society. I’m sure, everyone knows someone with a heart problem. So, if you want to understand how the heart works and what “brakes” it, you should read this book. Did you, for instance, know that heart cells don’t divide? Heart cells don’t regenerate. An eye-opening read about how the heart can fail and what is done today to remedy the possible heart failure, along with today’s up-to-date, new technology therapies. Written by a world-known cardiac scientist, the book is packed with interesting facts and jaw-dropping statistics and then leads to the future state of heart treatments.

About the author

Sian E. Harding, a recognized authority in cardiac science, is Emeritus Professor of Cardiac Pharmacology in the National Heart and Lung Institute at Imperial College London, where she led the Division of Cardiovascular Sciences and the BHF Centre for Cardiac Regeneration.