Can Chaos Save Lives?

According to the emerging science of chaos theory, many natural systems that appear utterly random -- tumbling waterfalls, roiling weather patterns, clusters of earthquakes -- are really governed by underlying mathematical patterns. Now an experiment reported in Science has shown that understanding chaos could one day save lives.

The problem in question is cardiac arrhythmia, an irregular beating of the heart that can be deadly. Some cardiac arrhythmias bear the telltale signs of chaos. By delivering a series of precisely timed electrical pulses, four scientists at UCLA, the College of Wooster in Ohio and the Naval Surface Warfare Center in Maryland theorized that they might be able to tame unruly hearts.

It works in the test tube. The four got a piece of rabbit-heart tissue to beat chaotically and monitored the chaos with a computer. The computer, programmed with an understanding of chaotic math, then delivered anti-chaotic pulses. And the heart tissue's beats became nearly regular. Whether the drug would work the same way in living humans is another question, but the researchers predict that "smart pacemakers" might one day correct cardiac problems that are now largely intractable.