Dr. Robert K. Jarvik, the principal designer of the first permanent artificial heart implanted in a human — a procedure that became a subject of great public fascination and fierce debate about medical ethics — died Monday at his home in Manhattan. He was 79.

His wife, writer Marilyn vos Savant, said the cause was complications of Parkinson’s disease.

In 1982, the U.S. Food and Drug Administration gave the University of Utah permission to implant what was designed to be a permanent artificial heart in a human. On Dec. 2 that year, Dr. William C. DeVries led the pioneering surgical team that implanted the Jarvik-7 model, made of aluminum and plastic, in a 61-year-old retired Seattle dentist, Barney B. Clark.

Clark at first declined to receive the Jarvik-7, DeVries was quoted as saying in a 2012 university retrospective, but he changed his mind on Thanksgiving after he had to be carried by a son to the dinner table. Clark’s chronic heart disease had left him weeks from death. If the surgery didn’t work for him, he told doctors, maybe it would help others.

During the seven-hour surgery, according to the retrospective, Clark’s heart muscle tore like tissue paper as it was removed after so many years of being treated with steroids.

Upon awakening, DeVries said, Clark told his wife, Una Loy Clark, “I want to tell you even though I have no heart, I still love you.”

Clark survived for 112 days, attached to a 400-pound air compressor, roughly the size of a dishwasher, that helped the Jarvik-7 pump blood through his body. But he never left the hospital, and he experienced seizures, kidney failure and a broken valve on the heart that needed replacing.

DeVries said in 2012 that Clark had probably received too many antibiotics, which can make it more difficult to fight off infections. He died March 23, 1983, from complications related to a bacterial infection of the colon.

William J. Schroeder, 52, a retired federal worker who was the second patient to receive the experimental Jarvik-7 artificial heart, lived for 620 days before dying in 1986. Another early recipient of the Jarvik-7, Murray P. Haydon, lived for 488 days before dying at 59.

Their survival demonstrated that people “could live long term on the plastic and metal device,” The New York Times reported upon Schroeder’s death. But the newspaper added that strokes and other complications that recipients suffered “impaired the quality of their lives and blunted initial enthusiasm for the heart.”

In 1985, Jarvik married Vos Savant, who was listed in Guinness World Records in the 1980s as having the highest recorded IQ (228).

She survives him, as do his daughter, Kate Jarvik Birch, and his son, Tyler Jarvik, from his marriage to Elaine Levin, whom he married in 1968 and divorced in 1985; Vos Savant’s two children, Mary (Younglove) Blinder and Dennis Younglove, from a previous relationship; a sister, Barbara Jarvik, and a brother, Jonathan Jarvik; and five grandchildren.