"But look at the literally thousands and thousands of patients who have had [Dacron graft] replacement for aneurysms of the aorta and other major arteries, not just in this country, but elsewhere. Its impact has been enormous."
Over the next three decades, DeBakey pioneered techniques for opening clogged arteries and supporting failing hearts or replacing them. He performed the first carotid endarterectomy in 1953 on a bus driver from Arkansas -- scraping out built-up plaque from the carotid artery so it could not break off and cause a stroke.
In 1964, he performed the first coronary artery bypass surgery, removing a section of vein from the patient's leg and inserting it into the coronary artery to bypass a blocked section.
Two years later, he was the first to implant a left ventricular assist device -- a small pump designed to take some of the load off a failing heart -- inserting it into the chest of a 37-year-old woman whose heart would not start after surgery. The pump operated for 10 days while her heart recovered. The woman lived six years before being killed in a traffic accident.
Two years after that, he performed the first multi-organ transplant, taking a heart, a lung and two kidneys from one donor and placing them in four recipients.
One of DeBakey's few failures involved his efforts to develop an artificial heart. He was one of the first to propose the idea and persuaded the federal government to fund the creation of an implantable gas-powered device.
One of his early collaborators at Baylor was Cooley, a technically brilliant surgeon, but they grew apart because of their strong personalities and competitive natures. In the early 1960s, Cooley moved his base to St. Luke's Episcopal Hospital, across the street from Methodist Hospital, where DeBakey practiced.
On April 4, 1969, Cooley implanted an artificial heart into the chest of Haskell Karp, a 47-year-old printing estimator from Skokie, Ill. The heart remained in place for 65 hours while a national appeal brought in a donor heart for a transplant, but Karp died 38 hours after the second surgery.
Although Cooley said the heart had been developed in his own laboratory with private funds, it turned out that Dr. Ray Liotta, a heart researcher who had worked in DeBakey's lab, covertly brought the device to Cooley.
DeBakey had refused to implant the heart in humans because only three of seven calves receiving the heart had survived, and then only for a maximum of 12 hours. Cooley said he was trying to save a patient's life.
