Pioneer of cardiovascular surgery. Born in Lake Charles, LA,
USA, on Sept 7, 1908, he died in Houston, TX, USA, on July 11,
2008, aged 99 years. The medical world probably should have
suspected that it had the makings of a giant on its hands when,
as a medical student at Tulane University in New Orleans, LA,
USA, in the early 1930s, Michael DeBakey built a pump that could
deliver blood from a donor to a patient. The so-called “roller
pump”, which would become part of the heart-lung machine, was
the first of many innovations for a man who would become
synonymous with cardiovascular surgery and rebuilding diseased
hearts. The list of DeBakey's firsts was quite long. He used a
cadaver graft to repair an aortic aneurysm in 1952, and did the
first successful carotid endarterectomy in 1953. Around that
time, he created the first Dacron grafts designed to fix artery
walls weakened by aneurysms. “The role of Providence in human
endeavor is speculative, but I would like to think that in a
personal case it was purposef