image: Cover art to "The Exquisite Machine" view more
Credit: The MIT Press, 2022.
The Exquisite Machine: The New Science of the Heart (20th September) offers unique and astonishing revelations about the human heart, uncovered by data from the very latest scientific advances. Sian E. Harding, a world leader in cardiac research, reveals some truly fascinating things that you probably didn’t know about the heart:
- Stem cells from a fetus can move into the mother’s circulation and remain there for decades, repairing damaged tissue. Because the baby has a mix of the genetic material from both parents, after pregnancy, a woman will carry the imprint of the baby’s father’s DNA for the rest of her life.
- There is a much deeper connection between the heart and the brain than we previously realized. As well as the multiple nerve highways between the two, there is a newly-discovered “mini-brain” within your heart which can sense and amplify your emotions and even tell you how to feel, changing the way you react to danger.
- Beating sheets of heart tissue can be made from a scraping of your skin. Because these cells are genetically matched to you, they can show whether your heart has faulty genes, as they will have the same abnormalities in beating as your own heart. Drugs can be tested on these cells before prescribing them to a patient.
- You can die of a broken heart – the loss of a partner or child is a proven trauma that can lead to sudden cardiac death. But “Broken Heart Syndrome”, in which Harding is a world expert, actually describes two different diseases that reveal a profound difference between men and women.
Harding describes this explosion of new science— including ultrafast imaging, gene editing, stem cells, artificial intelligence, and advanced sub-light microscopy—and the crucial, real-world consequences they have for our health and well-being.
Sian E. Harding 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 British Heart Founsation Centre for Cardiac Regeneration.
“How the heart works, how it fails and what can be done about it. A remarkable read from a world renowned researcher.”
—Stephen Westaby, author of the Sunday Times best sellers Fragile Lives and The Knife’s Edge
“This lively account on recent advances in heart research stands out by its accessibility to a broader audience—I just loved her analogies to pastry or "the heart as a city”!”
—Elisabeth Ehler, Professor of Cardiac Cell Biology, King’s College London, author of Cardiac Cytoarchitecture
“Exquisitely packed with facts, this book relates all you need to know about the heart and shares a scientist's crystal ball of future treatments.”
—Roy Taylor, Professor of Medicine and Metabolism, University of Newcastle, and author of Life Without Diabetes