Michael DeBakey, pioneering heart doctor, dies at 99

Michael DeBakey was awarded the Congressional Gold Medal, flanked by President Bush and House Speaker Nancy Pelosi. (Larry Downing/Reuters/File)

HOUSTON - Dr. Michael DeBakey, the world-famous cardiovascular surgeon who pioneered such now-common procedures as bypass surgery and invented a host of devices to help heart patients, has died. He was 99.

Dr. DeBakey died Friday in The Methodist Hospital in Houston of natural causes," according to a statement issued yesterday by Baylor College of Medicine and the hospital.

Dr. DeBakey counted world leaders among his patients and helped turn Baylor from a provincial school into one of the nation's great medical institutions.

"Dr. DeBakey's reputation brought many people into this institution, and he treated them all: heads of state, entertainers, businessmen, and presidents, as well as people with no titles and no means," said Ron Girotto, president of The Methodist Hospital System.

Girotto said the surgeon "improved the human condition and touched the lives of generations to come."

"There is no question that he was one of the pioneers of cardiovascular surgery in the last half of the 20th century," said Dr. Denton Cooley, the president and surgeon in chief at Texas Heart Institute in Houston and a longtime rival of Dr. DeBakey.

Cooley said one of Dr. DeBakey's greatest legacies is "that he influenced so many students to pursue careers in cardiovascular surgery."

While still in medical school in 1932, he invented the roller pump, which became the major component of the heart-lung machine, beginning the era of open-heart surgery. The machine takes over the function of the heart and lungs during surgery.

It was the start of a lifetime of innovation. The surgical procedures that Dr. DeBakey developed once were the wonders of the medical world. Today, they are commonplace procedures in most hospitals. He also was a pioneer in the effort to develop artificial hearts and heart pumps to assist patients waiting for transplants, and helped create more than 70 surgical instruments.

In early 2006, at the age of 97, Dr. DeBakey underwent surgery for a damaged aorta - a procedure he had developed.

"It is a miracle. I really should not be here," Dr. DeBakey said in a New York Times interview later that year.

In a 1985 Associated Press interview, Dr. DeBakey said: "I'm accused of being a perfectionist and, in the way it's usually defined, I guess I am. In medicine, and certainly in surgery, you have to be as perfect as possible. There's no room for mistakes."

Dr. DeBakey was the first to perform replacement of arterial aneurysms and obstructive lesions in the mid-1950s. He later developed bypass pumps and connections to replace excised segments of diseased arteries.

A tireless worker and a stern taskmaster, Dr. DeBakey had scores of patients under his care at any one time. He performed more than 60,000 heart surgeries during his 70-year career, The Methodist Hospital said.

His patients ranged from penniless peasants to such famous figures as the Duke of Windsor; the shah of Iran; King Hussein of Jordan; President Turgut Ozal of Turkey; Violetta Chamorro, a Nicaraguan leader; and Presidents Kennedy, Lyndon B. Johnson, and Nixon.

But he said celebrities didn't get special treatment on the operating table: "Once you incise the skin, you find that they are all very similar."

In 1996, he flew to Moscow to help examine the ailing Russian president, Boris N. Yeltsin, and he served as a consultant when Yeltsin underwent surgery.

Dr. DeBakey served as chairman of the President's Commission on Heart Disease, Cancer, and Stroke during Johnson's administration and helped establish the National Library of Medicine. He was author of more than 1,000 medical reports, papers, chapters, and books on surgery, medicine, and related topics.

"I like my work, very much. I like it so much that I don't want to do anything else," Dr. DeBakey said.

In 1953, he performed the first Dacron graft to replace part of an occluded artery. In the 1960s, he began coronary arterial bypasses.

In 1962, Dr. DeBakey received a $2.5 million grant to work on an artificial heart that could be implanted without being linked to an exterior console.

In 1966, he was the first to successfully use a partial artificial heart - a left ventricular bypass pump.

It was the first implantation of a complete artificial heart by Cooley in 1969 that led to the famous feud between the two surgeons that lasted until the two publicly made amends in 2007. The patient, Haskell Karp, 47, lived on the artificial heart for nearly five days, then received a heart transplant, but died 36 hours later.

Cooley was censured by the medical school and the National Heart Institute for using the experimental device, and he and Dr. DeBakey traded accusations. Cooley, who contended Karp was so ill he had no choice but to operate, left Baylor and established the Texas Heart Institute at St. Luke's Episcopal Hospital in Texas Medical Center.

Meanwhile, the effort to save lives through heart transplants was stalled. Dr. Christiaan Barnard in South Africa had performed the first human heart transplant in history in late 1967. In the United States, Dr. DeBakey and Cooley were among those who began performing the transplants, but death rates were high because the recipients' bodies rejected the new organs.

The advent of a new antirejection drug, cyclosporine, gave new impetus to organ transplants in the 1980s.

In 1984, Dr. DeBakey performed his first heart transplant in 14 years.

Dr. DeBakey's first wife, Diana Cooper DeBakey, died of a heart attack in 1972. He leaves his second wife, Katrin Fehlhaber, their daughter, and two of his four sons from his first marriage.