later succeed in the transplant of the TAH. After he left Utah, he attended a series of job interviews. The first one was at the Massachusetts General Hospital in Boston. The day of the interview, on his way to the hospital, he witnessed a person being stabbed by another man, and helped the victim until he was carried to the emergency room. This episode was probably one of the reasons why he decided not to start his residency in Boston. The second interview he attended was at the Johns Hopkins hospital, but eventually he opted for a residency at the Duke University in North Carolina. At the end of his nine years surgical training, he headed back to Salt Lake City. The artificial heart In 1979 Doctor DeVries went back to the University of Utah to become the chairman of thoracic and cardiovascular surgery; there, he used to perform two to five open-heart operations a week. At that time the university was known for being one of the country's few pioneering centers for advanced surgery on vital organs and their transplanting and implanting into animals and humans. In Salt Lake City he worked with doctor Robert Jarvik and doctor Kolff. By the time DeVries was back to Salt Lake City, the calves with artificial heart were able to live up to six, seven, even eight months. These results inspired him to take on with the work and so he started a series of long-term animal experiments. After two years of experiments, doctor DeVries and his colleagues tried to obtain the U.S. Food and Drug Administration (FDA) and the National Institutes of Health (NIH) approval. At the beginning, nobody really paid much consideration to the work, but after a while it started to acquire new attention, things changed, and even the NIH started to be interested in the project. Therefore, DeVries started to look for a suitable patient for the first attempt. In 1982, the FDA gave the approval to experiment the device on a human, and so a panel of six members at the University of Utah Medical Center started searching for a patient. The group was composed of two cardiologists, a psychiatrist, a nurse, a social worker and DeVries; the decision had to be unanimous. The first patient The first patient was a Seattle dental surgeon named Barney Clark, affected with an end-stage congestive heart failure. The seven-hour surgery