The Impossible Heart

They said it couldn’t be done, they being just about everybody in science, from the lowliest lab tech—excluding the ones working at Doris Taylor’s research laboratory at the University of Minnesota—to the honchos at the National Institutes of Health who refused to fund the initial work to create the world’s first transplantable bio-artificial heart.

Photo by Mark Luinenberg

One of the Taylor team’s bio-artificial hearts in a jar.

The first step—finding just the right mix of detergents that would strip a dead rat heart of all its cells while leaving the three-dimensional matrix they grew on intact—turned out to be the hardest. It took about a year. Getting the inert gelatinous structure ready to accept new stem cells from a live rat, injecting those cells into the matrix, and coaxing the heart to pump required less than a month. The now-famous “heart in a jar” had begun beating in the spring of 2005. Taylor would spend the next two years trying to get someone in science to believe it.

“Impossible,” the skeptics said. “Preposterous.” They should have known better than to use that kind of talk around Taylor, whose beating rat heart finally made the national news this past winter. “The last thing you want to tell Doris is you can’t go there,” says her sister, Juliana.

“I call ’em like I see ’em,” says Doris Taylor, several times a day. Taylor has an abiding love of the hackneyed phrase—as long as it gets her point across. Trust your crazy ideas. Think outside the box. Go for the home run. Make a difference. Trite maybe, but consider this: Practicing the truths she holds self-evident has made her one of the most original thinkers in science today.

Some compare her bio-artificial heart breakthrough to the discovery of penicillin, though such hyperbolic statements make her cringe. First, she says, it’s way too early to make such judgments. Moreover, she knows how they grate on scientists who are just as smart and dedicated as she is, but maybe haven’t been as lucky. “A million things could’ve gone wrong with that heart,” she says in her Mississippi accent.

On the other hand, few scientists follow the Taylor corollary to her observation about luck: Give nature the tools and get out of the way. The usual route to success in cell therapy research begins and ends in a petri dish, not with something as crude as a recycled rat heart cleansed of its cells and reseeded with new ones. Before coming to the U of M to occupy the prestigious Medtronic–Bakken Chair in Integrative Biology and Physiology, she hit her first home run at Duke University, training stem cells to turn into muscle cells. (Since hearts are mostly muscle, this is a critical step in creating a beating heart.)

In some respects, Taylor is true to type: a bit absentminded and not too concerned about her appearance until the media come calling—when she combs her hair, tucks in her blouse, takes off her glasses, and puts on some red lipstick. In other ways, she’s very much her own person, true to her roots. She’s given, for instance, to starting her sentences with the word so, which is usually followed by you know, long and drawn out and tilting toward a question mark, as if she’s thinking out loud, buying time, and also making sure her listener hasn’t futzed out after one too many fibroblasts and perfusable scaffolds.

Whether she’s explaining what endothelial cells do (line blood vessels) or why her all-time favorite book is The Secret Garden (“I’m a sap for stories full of feelings”), she doesn’t rest until she connects. She was painfully shy growing up, she says, and indecisive. She thought she wanted to be a physician when she majored in biology at Mississippi University for Women. Its president took an interest in her and pushed her hard. “I was lazy,” she says.

Self-awareness doesn’t necessarily give you a crystal-clear picture of yourself as others see you, especially if you’re a perfectionist. Juliana Taylor remembers her sister as a gregarious and highly industrious straight-A student who won a National Science Foundation trip to New York City for a high school project involving antibacterial substances secreted by red ants. It may have taken her awhile to decide between medical practice and research, but for as long as Juliana can remember, Doris has wanted to make a difference in people’s lives.

The lives of sick people, first and foremost.

Born in Germany to a career soldier and his wife, Doris Taylor grew up in the South in the sixties. After her dad died unexpectedly of cancer, her mother, Julia Taylor, brought six-year-old Doris and her twin brother, Dan, and one-year-old Juliana home so family could help raise them. Doris describes her mother as a strong woman who encouraged Doris and Juliana, who is a lawyer, to be whatever they wanted to be. “Mama had the brains but not the opportunities we had,” Doris says. “When I look back at her life”—she stops in midsentence and slowly shakes her head as if it’s just now beginning to sink in.

Julia Taylor had wanted to be a chemist like her father, but he couldn’t accept the notion of a woman scientist, so she majored in home economics and ended up in Japan. She was going to see the world one way or the other, Doris says. “Here’s this single woman in Japan, running service clubs for military guys, which is how she met my dad.”

If it was her mother who, as Taylor puts it, “planted the seed” of her ambition to be a scientist, family tragedy nurtured the seed into germinating. “My dad went from being sick to dying in two months,” she explains. Dan got the worst of it when the twins were born prematurely. (“We weren’t supposed to live,” Doris says.) Dan has cerebral palsy, and his care has always been a top priority in the Taylor family. “It brought us together like nothing else could have,” Doris says. “Mama made Dan the focal point of everything we did. She was a remarkable woman.”

Doris acknowledges that all that unfairness had its effect—not only the medical unfairness (Why did her dad have to die so young? Why was she born healthy and Dan wasn’t?), but the gender bias that kept her mother from having the career she’d wanted and the racial inequality of that place and time that came as a rude shock when the family moved home after Benton Taylor’s death. “Mama always told us, ‘Just do the right thing,’ ” Doris recalls. “She didn’t need to say any more.”

As a graduate student at the University of Texas Health Science Center in Dallas, Taylor thought she might end up in brain research, partly because of her brother. But she was told that the kind of real-world results that are the energizing force behind her sometimes unorthodox methods—in this case, seeing someone like Dan able to understand numbers, tell time, walk unassisted, and quell the demons that were eventually diagnosed as schizophrenia—could not be achieved in her lifetime or his. That’s when she decided, in the interest of making a difference, to concentrate on the heart.