DeBakey first saw a living heart in 1933, while he was a young intern at New Orleans Charity Hospital. Police had brought in a young stabbing victim and his pulsating heart could be clearly seen through the opening in his chest.
"I saw it beating and it was beautiful, a work of art, an awe-inspiring sight," he later told United Press International. "I still have an almost religious sense when I work on the heart. It is something God makes and we have yet to duplicate."
His creativity was evident early. While still in medical school, he invented a hand-cranked roller pump to help a researcher study pulse waves in fluids, such as blood. That device, in which the pump components never touched the fluid, was quickly adapted for use in blood transfusions and other applications. Eventually, it became the core of the heart-lung machine, invented in 1953 by Dr. John H. Gibbon Jr., which made coronary artery bypass and other types of heart surgery possible.
After DeBakey joined Baylor in 1948, he began developing theories and surgical techniques for repairing and replacing diseased arteries. One of his first interests was repairing aneurysms in the aorta -- dangerous bulges in the main artery that carries blood from the heart to the rest of the body.
Such an aneurysm could be surgically removed, but he needed something to replace the tissue or the aorta would become too small. DeBakey had purchased at a Houston department store synthetic cloth made of nylon or Orlon, looking for a replacement. One day, all the store had in stock was a new material called Dacron, so he bought a yard of that instead. Working on his wife's sewing machine, he fashioned the fabric into tubes the same size as blood vessels and implanted them in animals. They proved ideal.
"Unlike other materials, the body did not reject Dacron, and tissue was attracted to it," he said later. "It would hold onto it."
He sewed the Dacron graft into the first human patient Sept. 2, 1954. The patient lived 13 more years. Others since have survived much longer.
DeBakey subsequently convinced a textile manufacturer to begin knitting the Dacron into tubes in the same way that athletic socks are knitted. He considered this one of his most important achievements -- much more significant than his later work with an artificial heart.
"How many will receive an artificial heart?" he asked. "Not many, relative to the millions with heart disease.
