Michael DeBakey

His mother taught him to sew. In Lake Charles, Louisiana, where Shiker and Raheeja Dabaghi settled after emigrating separately from Lebanon and anglicized the name to DeBakey, the eldest of their five children learned to knit, crochet and tat, and could cut and assemble his own shirt by 10. He kept the books at his father's drugstore, met the physicians who came in, and was said by colleagues to have read the Encyclopaedia Britannica end to end. Tulane put him in a combined six-year program. In his final year of medical school, at 23, he adapted old pumps and rubber tubing into a roller pump that moved blood continuously from one person into another. Two decades on it became a core component of the heart-lung machine.

The war made him an administrator. From 1942 to 1946 he served in the Army Surgeon General's office, studying casualty data and pushing surgical teams toward the front, then stayed on to help build the Veterans Administration hospital system and the agency that tracked veterans' records. He is often credited with originating the MASH unit, a claim his biographer Craig Miller disputes. Baylor hired him to run surgery in 1948. Hunting material for an artificial artery, he found the store out of nylon, bought a yard of Dacron, and sewed the first grafts on his wife's sewing machine.

Denton Cooley came to Baylor in 1951, and for 18 years the two of them made Houston a world capital of heart surgery. On April 4, 1969, Cooley implanted a total artificial heart in a patient named Haskell Karp. The device had been developed in DeBakey's laboratory by Domingo Liotta, DeBakey was out of town, and he had not been asked. Karp lived 65 hours on the pump and died after a transplant. Cooley resigned from Baylor within months. Accounts differ sharply on both sides about who owned the design, what Liotta had agreed to, and whether the device was ready. What is not disputed is that the two men stopped speaking for roughly 40 years, and that in late 2007 DeBakey, then 99, admitted Cooley to the surgical society that carries his name.

In one trainee's phrase he could be sweet as dripping honey with patients and medical students, and brutal with surgical residents. He was still operating at 90. The tearing chest pain came at 97, while he was preparing a lecture, and the scan showed the aortic dissection he had classified and learned to repair 50 years earlier. He gave the lecture a week later anyway. When it progressed, his own doctors split over whether to cut, and by Lawrence Altman's account in The New York Times his wife Katrin pressed until the hospital ethics committee approved. George Noon operated on February 9 and 10, 2006. DeBakey went home eight months later and died just short of 100.

Michael DeBakey's life against the full span of the corpus.

• The roller pump invention
  Built at 23 from old pumps and rubber tubing, and later a core component of the heart-lung machine 1932
• The Dacron arterial graft invention
  Cut and sewn on his wife's sewing machine after the department store ran out of nylon 1954
• National Library of Medicine other
  He lobbied for the act that created it and later served on its Board of Regents 1956
• DeBakey classification of aortic dissection discovery
  Types I, II and III, still used alongside the Stanford system 1965
• Left ventricular assist pump invention
  The first successful implant of a pump taking over for a failing left ventricle 1966
• DeBakey VAD invention
  A miniaturized axial-flow heart pump developed with NASA engineers 1997

• 1932 aged ~24 Builds a roller pump in his final year of medical school He was 23. Two decades later the design became a core component of the heart-lung machine.
• 1939 aged ~31 With Alton Ochsner, proposes a link between smoking and lung cancer
• 1942 aged ~34 Joins the Surgical Consultants Division in the Army Surgeon General's office He served until 1946, rose to colonel, and won the Legion of Merit in 1945.
• 1948 aged ~40 Leaves Tulane to run surgery at Baylor, then a small school with no teaching hospital He chaired the department until 1993 and stayed on the faculty until his death.
• 1953 aged ~45 Performs the first successful carotid endarterectomy
• 1964 aged ~56 Performs the first successful coronary artery bypass
• April 4, 1969 aged 60 Denton Cooley implants an artificial heart from DeBakey's lab without telling him Cooley resigned from Baylor later that year. The two men did not speak again for about 40 years.
• February 9, 2006 aged 97 At 97, undergoes the aortic repair he devised himself George Noon operated over two days. DeBakey spent eight months in hospital and recovered.
• July 11, 2008 aged 99 Dies of natural causes at Houston Methodist Hospital at 99 He lay in repose at Houston City Hall, the first person to do so, and was buried at Arlington National Cemetery.

• Lyndon B. Johnson 1908–1973
  36th President who signed the Civil Rights Act and launched the Great Society programs. advised
• Vivien Thomas 1910–1985
  Devised the blue-baby heart operation without a medical degree, and went unnamed on the paper. fellow pioneer of cardiac surgery
• Charles Drew 1904–1950
  Physician-scientist whose work on blood plasma and blood banking saved countless lives. parallel work on blood transfusion