'Magician of the heart'

"But you know, you are trying to save a patient's life all the time," DeBakey said later. "You also have to follow ethical rules."

The incident led to a split between him and Cooley, which was healed only last year.

DeBakey's research took a different tack after he and Dr. George Noon performed a heart transplant on a NASA engineer in 1984. Talking about the newly launched space shuttle with the patient after the surgery, they wondered if it might be possible to adapt the massive impeller pumps used in the shuttle for a heart pump.

After much work, they produced an extremely small left ventricular assist device that is now manufactured by MicroMed Technology of Houston -- and called the MicroMed DeBakey. The device was first implanted in a patient in Berlin in 1998 and has now been used to assist failing hearts for as long as two years. It is small enough to be used in young children.

Michael Ellis DeBakey was born Sept. 7, 1908, in Lake Charles, La. His parents, Morris and Raheeja, were of Lebanese descent and immigrated to this country as children.

His father was a successful pharmacist who invested in farms, and theirs was a life of relative wealth. DeBakey, his brother and three sisters read voraciously and each had devoured the Encyclopedia Britannica before entering college.

DeBakey enrolled at Tulane, where he earned bachelor's and medical degrees.

After graduation, he spent two years at the University of Strasbourg in France and the University of Heidelberg in Germany. That started a lifetime of world travel to promote his cardiovascular techniques. He spoke French, German and Arabic.

He married Diana Cooper, a nurse he met in New Orleans, and joined the Tulane faculty.

Working again with Ochsner, DeBakey noticed that all the lung cancer patients in their hospital wards were smokers. At the time, most experts attributed the startling increase in lung cancer cases to the 1918 flu epidemic or exposure to poison gases in World War I. In 1939, DeBakey and Ochsner published the first scientific paper linking lung cancer to cigarettes.

When World War II broke out, DeBakey enlisted and joined the U.S. surgeon general's staff in Europe, where he lived for a time in the same castle as Gen. George S. Patton.

DeBakey observed that many soldiers died because their wounds could not be treated until they reached a hospital well behind the front lines.