“Ah, what a trifle is a heart, 
 
 If once into love’s hands it come!” 
 
 John Donne, The Broken Heart 
 
 That line, and those of thousands of other poems and love songs, may have to be rewritten, according to Professor Alain Carpentier, the inventor of the world’s first fully artificial, self-regulating heart. 
 
 His contraption is now beating inside the breast of a 75-year-old Frenchman. Controlled by a computer and made partly from chemically treated animal tissues, it is the culmination of a 30-year quest by Mr Carpentier, 80, for the “holy grail” of transplant surgery. 
 
 Asked on Sunday to comment on his discovery, he quoted the celebrated 19th century French scientist Claude Bernard: “Whatever the poets may say, the heart is just a pump.” 
 
 Mr Carpentier went on to add, however: “It’s a rather special kind of pump. If your loved one came through the door [and you had a Carpentier artificial heart], it would start to beat faster, just like a real one.” 
 
 Other types of artificial heart have been constructed and fitted, with varying degrees of success, such as Robert Jarvik’s device first implanted in 1982. Mr Carpentier’s invention is claimed to be the first to be completely artificial and self-regulating. It was constructed by a French medical engineering company, Carmat, and transplanted into a patient by two surgeons at a Paris hospital in a 10-hour operation last Wednesday. 
 
 The operation, leaked to the French press before it was to be officially announced this week, is reported to have gone well. The patient was said to have been “near death, without any other alternative available” but is now responding well. 
 
 Mr Carpentier hopes his artificial heart, powered by replaceable batteries carried outside the body, will help to solve the chronic shortage of hearts for transplant surgery. Unlike a real donor heart, it should not provoke rejection by the host. 
 
 The Carpentier heart weighs 900g, is roughly the same size as a real heart and imitates its functions exactly. Electrical sensors and microprocessors monitor the demands of the body for blood and adjust the operation of the heart accordingly. 
 
 In an interview on Sunday with the Journal du Dimanche, Professor Carpentier said he began his work on artificial hearts three decades ago. “I was confronted with a painful situation,” he said. “I was a doctor with a patient who was about to die from a defective heart when there was no transplant available.” 
 
 Mr Carpentier initially developed artificial heart valves made from chemically treated animal tissues. “I then decided to try to create an entire heart with these same materials,” he said. 
 
 The cost of a Carpentier artificial heart is estimated at £100,000 to £135,000 – about the same as the overall cost of providing a transplanted heart from an accident victim. The present model is the right size for 70 per cent of men and 25 per cent of women, but Mr Carpentier is developing a smaller version. ||||| PARIS (Reuters) - France's Carmat said on Friday it had carried out its first implant of an artificial heart that can beat for up to five years, adding that the operation had gone smoothly. 
 
 The implant operation was performed on Wednesday at the Georges Pompidou European Hospital in Paris, the biomedical firm said in a statement. It said that the male patient was awake and talking and he was being monitored in the intensive care unit. 
 
 "We are delighted with this first implant, although it is premature to draw conclusions given that a single implant has been performed and that we are in the early postoperative phase", said Carmat's CEO, Marcello Conviti. 
 
 Heart-assistance devices have been used for decades as a temporary solution for patients awaiting transplants, but Carmat's bioprosthetic product is designed to replace the real heart over the long run, mimicking nature's work using biological materials and sensors. 
 
 It is aimed at helping the thousands of patients who die each year while awaiting a donor, and reducing the side-effects associated with transplants. 
 
 "It's about giving patients a normal social life with the least dependence on medication as possible," Alain Carpentier, surgeon and Carmat co-founder, told France 2 television. 
 
 Carmat estimates around 100,000 patients in the United States and Europe could benefit from its artificial heart, a market worth more than 16 billion euros ($22 billion). 
 
 "We already had devices of this type but they had a relatively low autonomy. This heart will allow for more movement and less clotting. The study that is starting is being very closely watched in the medical field," Patrick Nataf, head of heart surgery at Paris Bichat hospital, told BFM TV. 
 
 France's Health Minister was quick to tout the operation as a sign of the country's edge in the field of healthcare. 
 
 "This news brings great pride to France," Marisol Touraine told BFM TV. "It shows we are pioneers in healthcare, that we can invent, that we can carry an innovation that will also bring great hope to plenty of people." 
 
 Among Carmat's competitors for artificial heart implants are privately-held SynCardia Systems and Abiomed, both of the United States. 
 
 "We're very happy for them and we wish them the best in their pursuit," said a spokesman for SynCardia, whose artificial heart is the only one approved both in the United States and the European Union and has been implanted over 1,200 times. 
 
 The longest a patient has lived with SynCardia's heart is just under four years. 
 
 THREE TIMES HEAVIER THAN A HEALTHY HEART 
 
 In September, Carmat got the green light from French authorities to test the first human implants of the device on four patients in three hospitals. Earlier this year, it won approval to proceed with human implants in Belgium, Poland, Slovenia and Saudi Arabia. 
 
 The Paris patient is the first worldwide to be implanted with the device, Carmat said. The patients selected for the trials suffer from terminal heart failure and the success of the device will be judged on whether they survive with the implant for at least a month. 
 
 Conviti told Reuters last month Carmat hoped to finish human trials of the heart by the end of next year and to obtain approval to market them in the EU by early 2015. 
 
 The Carmat device, developed by a team of engineers from Airbus parent company EADS, weighs about 900g (around 2 lb)- nearly three times more than an average healthy human heart. It is expected to cost 140,000 to 180,000 euros in Europe. 
 
 It mimics heart muscle contractions and contains sensors that adapt the blood flow to the patient's moves. 
 
 It is powered by external, wearable lithium-ion batteries. Inside the heart, surfaces that come into contact with human blood are made partly from bovine tissue instead of synthetic materials such as plastic that can cause blood clots. 
 
 Patients that will be implanted with Carmat's devices are more likely to be men. Heart failure affects more men than women and the sheer size of the artificial heart means it can fit in 86 percent of men but only around 20 percent of women. 
 
 But Carmat says it could easily manufacture a smaller version to fit the smaller bodies of women as well as patients in India and China. 
 
 Carmat's shares have risen five-fold since floating on the Paris stock market in 2010, giving the company a market capitalization of about 436 million euros. 
 
 ($1 = 0.7315 euros) 
 
 (Additional reporting by Mark John; Editing by Hugh Lawson and Rosalind Russell)
– Alain Carpentier thinks he has an answer to chronic shortages of organ donors. The French cardiac surgeon—under Carmat, the French company he founded—has invented what the Independent calls the "world's first fully artificial, self-regulating heart," and it apparently works, at least very initially. Carpentier's creation was successfully transplanted into a 75-year-old on Wednesday; he's said to be responding favorably. If you're wondering why it deserves the label "first," especially considering Robert Jarvik's artificial heart was first implanted in 1982, Carpentier, 80, explains that his is the first heart to self-regulate, mimicking an actual heart. "If your loved one came through the door [and you had a Carpentier artificial heart], it would start to beat faster, just like a real one," he says. Further, surfaces that are exposed to human blood are made in part from cow tissue, rather than synthetic material, which can produce blood clots and therefore require the use of anticoagulants; its design also minimizes the chance of rejection, reports the Financial Times. Most importantly, it's designed to sidestep the need for a donor heart: Reuters reports the current model, powered by external lithium batteries, is expected to keep a patient alive for up to five years. The heart was three decades in the making, and the end result is similar in size to a real heart, though it weighs three times more (at nearly 2 pounds) and isn't sized correctly for all—about 86% of men but only 20% of women, reports Reuters (a smaller model is planned). The expected cost is $190,000 to $220,000, on par with the cost of a traditional heart transplant. The Carmat heart has been approved for testing in three more French patients; the initial trial seeks to determine whether the patients can survive at least one month. (Click to read about another remarkable transplant story.)