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This documentary film accompanies two patients at the German Heart Center in Berlin as they recover from artificial heart operations. It portrays their everyday lives and emotions in an attempt to understand what it's like to live with man-made organs.

Artificial hearts are designed either to serve as a temporary measure until a donor heart is available, or in the best possible scenario, to act as permanent replacement. Professor Roland Hetzer, medical director of the German Heart Center in Berlin, is convinced that the future of cardiac medicine belongs to such pumps – because in modern service-oriented societies cardio-circulatory disease is the main cause of death. Patients waiting for a donor heart are becoming more and more numerous. Yet there is a decreasing readiness amongst the population to donate their organs after death. Sometimes patients have to wait twelve months for a heart. And many fail to survive the waiting period. Thanks to the artificial heart, many heart patients can now nurture fresh hopes.

In Focus documentaries and reports cover business and science, culture and education, historical and present day events as well as sports and leisure. This wide variety of topics is investigated in depth and presented in an informative format, making for captivating television, courtesy of Germany's Deutsche Welle news network.