Pioneering Heart Surgeon

As a reward for doing well in his schoolwork, his parents let him read the Encyclopaedia Britannica. He played several musical instruments, participated in sports, sewed and maintained a garden with his brother.

He graduated from Tulane, in New Orleans, in 1930 and received his medical degree two years later. He completed two years of surgical residency training at Charity Hospital in New Orleans and received a master's of science degree at Tulane in 1935 for research on peptic ulcers. He then went to Europe to study under two prominent surgeons: Rene Leriche of the University of Strasbourg, France, and Martin Kirschner of the University of Heidelberg in Germany.

With his mentor at Tulane, Alton Ochsner, Dr. DeBakey was among the first to link lung cancer to smoking in a medical journal article in 1939. But most of his life's work related to the heart, blood vessels and the causes of arteriosclerosis.

He volunteered for military service during World War II and was assigned to the surgeon general's office, where his work resulted in the creation of MASH units and the Veterans Affairs hospital research system. Dr. DeBakey also proposed systematic follow-up studies of veterans with certain medical problems, which eventually became the VA's medical research program. He received the Legion of Merit in 1945 for his wartime achievements.

After the war, Dr. DeBakey returned to Tulane as an associate professor of surgery, and in 1948 was named chairman of the department of surgery at Baylor University College of Medicine in Houston. He remained at Baylor for the rest of his academic career, eventually becoming president, then chancellor, of the medical school. He also was director of the Methodist DeBakey Heart Center in Houston.

Early in his career, he became fascinated with atherosclerosis, also known as "hardening of the arteries," when the prognosis was poor and victims usually died by the age of 50. During the 1950s, Dr. DeBakey was the first to classify arterial disease by location, characteristic and pattern, making diagnosis much easier, although the cause remained unknown.

His innovations in surgery were not limited to the heart. He revolutionized treatments for strokes and aneurysms, replacing damaged blood vessels with a segment of the intestine. The once-risky procedure later became a standard surgical practice.

The first time Dr. DeBakey performed the operation, he said in a 2006 interview, the patient "happened to be from Lake Charles, a bus driver who was having what we call TIA's, transient ischemic attacks . . . when he was driving a bus. I explained to him what was involved, that the operation was a relatively simple technical procedure. And I think maybe because I was from Lake Charles too, he had confidence in what I said, and . . . it fortunately proved very successful. In fact, he lived 19 years after that, died of a heart attack. Never had any more transient ischemic attacks."

In 1963, Dr. DeBakey's work in arterial disease was recognized with an Albert Lasker Clinical Research Award. A year later, he removed a large vein from a patient's leg, rerouting blood around the damaged areas between the aorta and coronary arteries, thus becoming the first doctor to successfully perform what is commonly called bypass surgery.

In 1965, while he performed open-heart surgery in Houston, the operation was beamed by satellite to medical faculty members at Geneva University in Switzerland. Dr. DeBakey explained the procedure, in English and French, as he operated. It was believed to be the first practice of telemedicine.

His early prediction that an artificial heart could be practical prompted widespread skepticism, but he successfully transplanted the first partial-artificial heart in 1966. The first full artificial heart, developed in Dr. DeBakey's lab at the Baylor College of Medicine, was implanted into a dying 47-year-old man by a colleague, Denton Cooley, in 1969. That surgery caused one of medicine's historic feuds; Dr. DeBakey felt that his decade-long work on the device had been stolen. The men finally ended the rift in 2007 when Cooley's Cardiovascular Surgical Society presented Dr. DeBakey with a lifetime achievement award.

He did not shy away from taking stands that could be controversial, if he believed they were for the good of the public. He led the movement to establish the National Library of Medicine and the Uniformed Services University of the Health Sciences in Bethesda. He was chairman of the President's Commission on Heart Disease, Cancer and Stroke, and his advice was sought by presidents since Harry S. Truman.