“I want to make an artificial heart,” Dr. Azad Najar told a Swedish heart surgeon 18 years ago. The professor replied: “This is impossible. You cannot do this.”
His mother had a similar response when the doctor shared his ambition with her: “This is impossible my son. Only God can create a heart.”
Nearly two decades later, “It turned out my son was right. He did what he said he was going to do,” said Najar’s mother.
The artificial heart is in its final stage now and the Swedish heart surgeon has apologized to be negative to the idé of developing an artificial heart.
At Scandinavian Real Heart in the Swedish city of Västerås, Najar and his colleagues are busy completing the artificial heart, which is similar in size to the natural heart.
“The Swedish royal family told me they would support my project,” Najar told Rudaw. “It is nearly completed. We have a great team which is working intensively with the development of the artificial heart. Heart failure can no longer take the lives of all these people in the world.”
Najar is from the town of Zakho in the Kurdistan Region. Due to his father’s political activities, his family moved to Baghdad when he was a child. His father was a well-known lawyer in Zakho and had taken part in Kurdistan’s political revolutions.
“When we moved to Baghdad, we had to speak Arabic outside. But we had to speak Kurdish at home,” Najar recalled.
He studied at the University of Mosul and obtained a medical degree. He said he was among the popular students at the university.
He moved to Sweden in the 1990s. Four years later, he embarked on a mission to make an artificial heart, an organ that had always fascinated him.
Najar comes from a big family of nine. His parents are over ninety years of age and still living. One of his brothers is a distinguished professor in Sweden.
“All my children are very smart and they have made us proud,” Najar’s mother said. “Najar was like this even as a child. The things he was doing were bigger than his age.”
“Did you have confidence in me that I could make an artificial heart,” Najar asked his father, who replied: “I believe that you will succeed in whatever you do.”
Najar said his parents’ support and encouragement made him try harder: “I want always to make my parents proud.”
Najar’s dreams don’t end with the artificial heart.
He wants to gain more knowledge regarding the function and physiology of the natural heart to help patients in different ways and develop and optimal artificial heart.
“To use our artificial heart as a tool to understand how our natural heart is really working is something very good for our ongoing project and bigger than the artificial heart project. It will add more value to our artificial heart project. We will possibly revolutionize human health after it is completed and after getting good results. It will enable us to come up with a different understanding of how the heart functions, which will be different from the one arrived at by scholars."
He maintains close ties with the Kurdistan Region, pledging to make his artificial heart readily available.
“As long as I work on the artificial heart project, I will ensure patients from Kurdistan and many other countries have easy access to this heart in order to save a maximum number of patients. Particular health infrastructure should be dedicated for patients carrying this heart. There should be people trained in this matter to help patients with this heart in case the patient encounters a health problem. I will do my best to help my nation,” Najar said.
Last updated 11:51pm. Jan, 16, 2019.
