Your heart is a miracle in motion, a marvel of construction unsurpassed by any human-made creation. It beats 100,000 times every day—if you were to live to 100, that would be more than 3 billion beats across your lifespan. Despite decades of effort in labs all over the world, we have not yet been able to replicate the heart’s perfect engineering.

But new scientific developments are opening the mysteries of the heart. And this explosion of new science—ultrafast imaging, gene editing, stem cells, artificial intelligence, and advanced sub-light microscopy—has crucial, real-world consequences for our health and well-being.

Sian Harding, a world leader in cardiac research, explores the relation between emotions and heart function, revealing that the heart not only responds to our emotions, it creates them as well. Drawing from her new book The Exquisite Machine, Harding details the evolutionary forces that have shaped the heart’s response to damage, the astonishing rejuvenating power of stem cells, how we can avoid heart disease, and why it can be so hard to repair a damaged heart. She also shares how cutting-edge technologies are enabling experiments and clinical trials that will lead to new solutions to curing the world’s leading cause of death: heart disease.

The Exquisite Machine: The New Science of the Heart (The MIT Press) is available for purchase.

Listen to Dr. Sian Harding’s interview on the Not Old Better podcast with host Paul Vogelzang.

Book Sale Information

• Purchase your copy of The Exquisite Machine: The New Science of the Heart by Sian Harding here.
• SPECIAL NOTE: Politics and Prose is offering a 10% discount to Smithsonian Associates ticket-holders. To claim your discount, enter the code SPECIAL10 (no space between letters and numbers) in the “Coupon discount” section on Politics and Prose's check-out page.

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