On the exterior, he is living a normal healthy life; but patient Craig Lewis doesn't have a heart beat.  To all intents and purposes he is, by all medical standards, dead.  The 10,000rpm artificial turbine in his chest contradicts this though.

Invented by Doctors Bud Frazier and Billy Cohn of the Texas Heart Institute, the device can completely replace the heart's duty to provide a continuous blood flow around the body, without making a pulse.  The pump was tested on fifty calves before any kind of executive decision was made to perform the operation on humans.  Craig Lewis made the ideal choice, clinging on to the last 24 of life with a heart that was failing to support his body.

The fact that this operation was successful in completely stabilising this patient is insurmountable proof that the human pulse need not be replicated to continue life.  It's not a necessary factor.  And that in itself is nothing short of the beginning of a revolution in medical science.

Heart Stop Beating | Jeremiah Zagar from Focus Forward Films on Vimeo.