The heart: The 5 best books on understanding the muscle at the centre of our circulatory system
I wrote The Exquisite Machine to make people think about their heart anew, with a greater sense of wonder and awe. I’ve been working to understand the heart for more than 40 years and every time we get a better way to see it close up, or an advance in how we can manipulate cells, there are new revelations about this incredible organ. Although, of course, our aim is to do something helpful for heart disease , it can be frustrating only to focus on what goes wrong, rather than celebrate how often it goes right! The 500 million years of evolution that shaped the heart has created something that engineers can only envy – in fact, its exquisitely precise and beautiful construction is one of the biggest barriers to our attempts to repair or replace it. Early ideas about the heart began by casting it as the seat of emotion . This rather fell out of favour as we scientists took over and reclassified it as a giant muscle. But now we have come full circle, and started to realise that the hea...
