Dr. Michael DeBakey (1908-2008)

Houston has lost a world pioneer in heart medicine and surgery. On Friday night, Dr. Michael DeBakey passed away from natural causes at the age of 99 -- two months short of his 100th birthday.

Dr. DeBakey was the product of Lebanese immigrants, born September 7, 1908 across the Sabine River in Lake Charles, Louisiana. When he received his Bachelor's and medical degrees from Tulane University in 1932, heart disease was practically a fatal condition, once recalling "...If a patient came in with a heart attack, it was up to God." During his time in medical school, DeBakey created the roller pump, which acts as the defacto heart during open-heart surgery. It was the beginning of a multitude of innovations that bear Dr. DeBakey's name; over 70 surgical instruments were created with at least partial involvement from Dr. DeBakey.

Dr. DeBakey also invented a new blood transfusion needle, suture scissors, and colostomy clamp in his early days when he taught at Tulane before serving in World War II developing MASH units and special facilities for the returning wounded. He returned to Tulane before joining Baylor College of Medicine (at the time affiliated with the namesake university in Waco) in 1948. His many patients ranged from hardscrabble Houstonians to heads of state (such as the Shah of Iran and Richard Nixon), and every other socioeconomic group in between. He also once served as a consultant to a surgical team that operated on Russian President Boris Yeltsin. Over 50,000 surgeries were performed by Dr. DeBakey by 1992. In February 2006, Dr. DeBakey himself underwent a surgery he developed earlier -- to repair a damaged aorta.

At Baylor, Dr. DeBakey performed the first Dacron graft and later began coronary artery bypasses by the 1960s. In 1962, DeBakey began work on an artificial heart -- culminating in the invention of a partial artificial heart. When a full such heart was developed in 1969 by one of his former students, Dr. Denton Cooley, the National Heart Institute sounded the alarm and censured Dr. Cooley, who ended up leaving Baylor following a heated rivalry with Dr. DeBakey over their research (The recipient, Haskell Karp, received a heart transplant after a five-day stint on the artificial heart and tragically lasted a day and a half afterwards). Dr. Cooley went over to St. Luke's Episcopal Hospital to launch the Texas Heart Institute. The two rival surgeons eventually made amends in 2007. Dr. DeBakey received a multitude of awards and honors, and continued to practice medicine to the day he died.

In full, Dr. DeBakey's death is not only an enormous loss for all of Greater Houston and the Texas Medical Center, but it is also a loss for the world of medicine as well. Without the pioneering prowess of Dr. DeBakey, chances are our life expectancies would have been shorter, heart disease would continue to be a relatively fatal condition and the Med Center would not be the most prominent medical complex in the world; in fact, more heart surgeries have been performed here than anywhere else globally. It is especially crucial in these days and times that heart medicine is seen as especially important given all the various setbacks related to heart conditions that have been gaining worldwide attention such as obesity, diabetes, cancer and various other ailments.

Dr. Michael DeBakey has passed on, but his spirit of innovation, courage and perseverance in one of the most enduring, controversial and challenging professions of study will forever live on.