A friend of mine, in her forties, was faced with the choice of a wheel chair or a double hip replacement. She took the artificial hips and is now a salsa dancer, doing dips and turns in high-heeled red pumps and dazzling dancers 30 years her junior—she's adviser to the Ballroom Dance club on campus.

Ask her, and she'd say salsa was the whole point of medical research.

Ask McCollister Evarts, CEO of the Milton S. Hershey Medical Center and a professor of orthopaedics in Penn State's College of Medicine, and he'd agree.

"Biomedical research has at its core the advancement of knowledge through discovery," Evarts said, "ultimately translating to improved care for the patient."

In the late 1960s, when Evarts began practicing, hip replacement was in its infancy in the United States, he noted. Evarts performed one of the first replacements at the Cleveland Clinic. He continued his "interest," as he calls it, in total joint reconstruction for 23 years, performing several thousand procedures during his 10 years at the Cleveland Clinic and 13 more at the University of Rochester Medical Center. Along the way, he also edited the five-volume textbook, Surgery of the Musculoskeletal System.

"At the beginning of the total hip era," he said, "replacements were restricted to people 65 years or older. Many had severe degenerative osteoarthritis and had suffered for years, developing muscle wasting and severe limitations of motion. In three decades, significant advances have been made in the metals and plastics used, along with major refinements in the surgical techniques of total hip reconstruction. We did not encourage strenuous activities in the early '70s. Now, salsa's the limit!"

Since he began practicing, Evarts said, medical research has had a profound effect on how doctors are educated and how patients are cared for. "It goes from bench to bedside," he said. "We're seeing more and more collaborations between clinicians and bench scientists."

A great example, he added, is the artificial heart.

"When we started this work in the 1960s," noted Penn State's Gerson Rosenberg in a speech last October to a group a science writers visiting the Hershey Medical Center, "there were no brushless DC motors."

Forty years ago, who would have thought that new motor technology—along with advances in microelectronics and durable plastic materials—would be the key to a totally implantable artificial heart? One in which the recipient was not hospitalbound, tethered to a large, unwieldy machine, as were the first artificial heart patients, but could walk around totally free, his or her heart ticking from an internal battery, for a full 30 minutes? Wearing an eight-pound battery backpack (it converts to a shoulderbag), the patient can live a normal life for up to six hours before stopping to "recharge his batteries," literally in this case, by plugging the battery backpack into a wall socket—or even into the lighter socket in a car. (Your heart will skip a beat to remind you it's time to recharge.) "You can spend the whole day away from home with these two batteries and being plugged in," Rosenberg said.

Penn State is now testing just such a total artificial heart. Holstein calves with the experimental heart have lived longer than a year, according to William Pierce, head of the artificial organ program at Penn State. To live longer, they'd need to be fitted with a larger heart, Rosenberg explained: The calves outgrew the test instrument's pumping capacity. In every other way, the animals seem quite satisfied with their mechanical tickers.

Certainly the one that got away from its handler during its daily outdoor recess didn't know it was supposed to be careful. Rosenberg has a snapshot of the runaway leading the research team on a merry chase. "To look at that animal, you wouldn't know it had an artificial heart," he said. "It doesn't seem encumbered at all."

Soon the same may be true for people. They might even take up salsa dancing as heart therapy.