Quest to build a heart gets lift from jellyfish

In their quest to build a beating heart from scratch,

Harvard University researchers looked to the sea

for inspiration, building a tiny swimming “jellyfish”

out of rat heart cells and a thin, jellyfish-shaped

polymer film.

The real jellyfish, a simple aquatic creature

buffeted by ocean currents, may seem a world

away from the human heart, but researchers found

that the repetitive pulsations jellyfish use to swim

through salt water are similar to the way the heart

pumps blood through the human body.

“I do a lot of cardiac research, and . . . I started

looking at marine life forms, [thinking] maybe we

don’t understand the fundamental laws of muscular

pumps,” said Kevin Kit Parker, a professor of

bioengineering and applied physics at Harvard who

was one of the project’s leaders.

Parker had become frustrated with the lack of new

drugs for various heart problems and began to

wonder if one of the bottlenecks could be

incomplete understanding of how the heart really

works.

Then,