Jarvik is not a cardiologist, as the ads might have led one to believe.
The revolutionary pump, the Jarvik 2000, uses a turbine to increase the power of each heartbeat.
Almost 20 years have passed since Barney Clark lived for 112 days on the Jarvik-7 heart.
Barney Clark had tubes sticking out of his chest to an air compressor that powered the Jarvik-7.
Unlike Dr Jarvik's device, this newfangled bundle of titanium and polyurethane aims to set the patient free.
ECONOMIST: A promising new artificial heart wins regulatory approval
But Jarvik-7 was a complicated affair that needed to be connected via tubes to machines outside the body.
ECONOMIST: A promising new artificial heart wins regulatory approval
The science has come a long way since the days of the Jarvik-7.
Representatives fumed over the portrayal of the ad's spokesman, Robert Jarvik, an M.
The Jarvik 2000 is much smaller, meaning in theory it can be left in permanently, provided it does not fail mechanically.
Even Robert Jarvik himself gave up the quest in the late 1980s.
Moreover, in one of the commercials Jarvik is portrayed as vigorously plying the waters in a scull, when in actuality he doesn't row.
Patients on the CardioWest heart, the successor to the Jarvik-7, have to wheel around a machine the size of a small refrigerator and are confined to a hospital.
The first serious attempt to build one happened in the 1980s, when Jarvik-7, made by Robert Jarvik, a surgeon at the University of Utah, captured the world's attention.
ECONOMIST: A promising new artificial heart wins regulatory approval
Artificial hearts are nothing new: AbioMed implanted its first replacement heart unit in 2001, and as far back as the 1980s the considerably more cumbersome Jarvik 7 was unveiled to the public.
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