Artificial heart of instances of bleeding, and asked several times to be allowed to die. On April 4, 1969, Domingo Liotta and Denton A. Cooley replaced a dying man's heart with a mechanical heart inside the chest at The Texas Heart Institute in Houston as a bridge for a transplant. The man woke up and began to recover. After 64 hours, the pneumatic-powered artificial heart was removed and replaced by a donor heart. However thirty-two hours after transplantation, the man died of what was later proved to be an acute pulmonary infection, extended to both lungs, caused by fungi, most likely caused
Human artificial chromosome resulted in a human artificial chromosome that is mitotically stable. 21HAC was also able to be transferred into cells from a variety of species (mice, chickens, humans). Using 21HAC, researchers were able to insert a herpes simplex virus- thymidine kinase coding gene into tumor cells. This "suicide gene" is required to activate many antiviral medications. These targeted tumor cells were successfully, and selectively, terminated by the antiviral drug ganciclovir in a population including healthy cells. This research opens a variety of opportunities for using HACs in gene therapy. In 2011, researchers formed a human artificial chromosome by truncating chromosome 14.