Michael DeBakey

In early 2008, DeBakey attended the groundbreaking for the new Michael E. DeBakey Library and Museum at Baylor College of Medicine in Houston, which honors his life, work and dedication to care and teaching. The museum officially opened on Friday, May 14, 2010.

DeBakey continued to practice medicine until his death in 2008 at the age of 99. His contributions to the field of medicine spanned the better part of 75 years. DeBakey operated on more than 60,000 patients, including several heads of state. DeBakey and a team of American cardiothoracic surgeons, including George Noon, supervised quintuple-bypass surgery performed by Russian surgeons on Russian president Boris Yeltsin in 1996.

He received the Presidential Medal of Freedom in 1969. In 1987, President Ronald Reagan awarded him the National Medal of Science. He was a Health Care Hall of Famer, a Lasker Luminary and a recipient of the United Nations Lifetime Achievement Award and the Presidential Medal of Freedom with Distinction. He was given the Lifetime Achievement Award of the Foundation for Biomedical Research and in 2000 was cited as a "Living Legend" by the Library of Congress. On April 23, 2008, he received the Congressional Gold Medal from President George W. Bush, Speaker of the House Nancy Pelosi and Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid. DeBakey's major awards include:

DeBakey died from natural causes at Houston Methodist Hospital on July 11, 2008, at the age of 99. After lying in repose in Houston's City Hall, the first ever to do so, DeBakey received a memorial service at the Co-Cathedral of the Sacred Heart on July 16, 2008. He was granted ground burial at Arlington National Cemetery by the Secretary of the Army. On January 21, 2009, DeBakey became the first posthumous recipient of the Denton A. Cooley Leadership Award.

In late 2005, DeBakey suffered an aortic dissection. Years prior, DeBakey had pioneered the surgical treatment that now bears his name to treat this condition. A sharp chest pain sent him to Houston Methodist Hospital, where the diagnosis was confirmed by a CT scan. DeBakey initially resisted the surgical option, but as his health deteriorated and DeBakey became unresponsive, the surgical team opted to proceed with surgical intervention. In a controversial decision, Houston Methodist's ethics committee approved the operation; on February 9–10, DeBakey at age 98 became the oldest patient ever to undergo the surgery for which he was responsible. The operation by George Noon to repair his aorta with a Dacron graft, similar to one he had pioneered decades earlier, lasted seven hours. After a complicated post-operative course that required eight months in the hospital at a cost of over one million dollars, DeBakey was released in September 2006 and returned to good health to live for another two years.

In 1980 DeBakey was a consultant in the care of Mohammad Reza Pahlavi, the exiled Shah of Iran, who was in the terminal stages of lymphoma. Due to hypersplenism, the Shah underwent splenectomy in Cairo on March 28, 1980, with DeBakey supervising a team of surgeons. At operation, the Shah was found to be harboring widely metastatic disease. Several complications developed in the postoperative period, including a subphrenic abscess and pneumonia. Although these were successfully treated, the Shah succumbed from his malignancy on July 27.

In 1976, DeBakey's trainees students founded the Michael E. DeBakey International Cardiovascular Surgical Society, which later changed its name to the Michael E. DeBakey International Surgical Society. Every two years, the Michael E. DeBakey Surgical Award is given.

In the 1960s, DeBakey and his team of surgeons performed some of the early instances of surgeries on film.

In 1958, to counteract narrowing of an artery caused by an endarterectomy, DeBakey performed the first successful patch-graft angioplasty. This procedure involved patching the slit in the artery from an endarterectomy with a Dacron or vein graft. The patch widened the artery so that when it closed, the channel of the artery returned to normal size.

DeBakey performed the first successful carotid endarterectomy in 1953. A year later, he pioneered techniques in grafts for the various parts of the aorta.

DeBakey hired surgeon Denton Cooley at Baylor College of Medicine in 1951. They collaborated until Cooley's resignation from his faculty position at the college in 1969.

In the 1950s, DeBakey's observations and classification of atherosclerotic blood vessels permitted innovations in the treatments of vascular disease. His pursuit of the ideal material to make grafts led him to a department store that had run out of nylon, so he settled on polyethylene terephthalate (Dacron) and bought a yard of the material. Using his wife's sewing machine, DeBakey produced the first arterial Dacron grafts to replace or repair blood vessels. He subsequently collaborated with a research associate from the Philadelphia College of Textiles and Science to create a knitting machine for making grafts.

DeBakey joined the faculty of Baylor University College of Medicine (now known as the Baylor College of Medicine) in 1948, serving as chairman of the surgical department until 1993. DeBakey was president of the college from 1969 to 1979, and served as its chancellor from 1979 to January 1996, when he was named chancellor emeritus. He was Olga Keith Wiess and Distinguished Service Professor in the Michael E. DeBakey Department of Surgery at Baylor College of Medicine and director of the DeBakey Heart Center for research and public education at Baylor College of Medicine and Houston Methodist Hospital.

The Albert Lasker Award for Clinical Medical Research, given by the Lasker Foundation since 1946, was renamed the Lasker-DeBakey Clinical Medical Research Award in DeBakey's honor in 2008.

During the Second World War, DeBakey served in the US Army in the Surgical Consultants’ Division in the Office of the Surgeon General of the Army. In 1945, he was given the Legion of Merit award. Although sometimes credited in recent years for establishing the system of Mobile Army Surgical Hospitals, research has shown that DeBakey actually led the effort to prevent the establishment of these units.

With his mentor, Alton Ochsner, in 1939 DeBakey postulated a strong link between smoking and carcinoma of the lung, a hypothesis that other researchers supported as well.

Born to Lebanese immigrants, DeBakey was inspired to pursue a career in medicine by the physicians that he had met at his father's drug store, and he simultaneously learned sewing skills from his mother. He subsequently attended Tulane University for his premedical course and Tulane University School of Medicine to study medicine. At Tulane, he developed a version of the roller pump, which he initially used to transfuse blood directly from person to person and which later became a component of the heart–lung machine. Following early surgical training at Charity Hospital, DeBakey was encouraged to complete his surgical fellowships in Europe, before returning to Tulane University in 1937. During the Second World War, he worked in the Surgical Consultants Division of the Office of the Army Surgeon General, and later was involved in the establishment of the Veterans Administration.

Returning to Tulane Medical School, DeBakey served on the surgical faculty from 1937 to 1948.

DeBakey married Diana Cooper after returning from Europe in 1937, and they had four sons: Michael, Dennis, Ernest and Barry. After Diana died in 1972, he married German actress Katrin Fehlhaber, with whom he had a daughter, Olga-Katarina.

Between 1933 and 1935, DeBakey remained in New Orleans to complete his internship and residency in surgery at Charity Hospital, and in 1935, he received a MS for his research on stomach ulcers. As was the trend for ambitious training surgeons at the time, and as his mentors Rudolph Matas and Alton Ochsner had done before him, DeBakey was encouraged to complete his surgical fellowships at the University of Strasbourg, France, under Professor René Leriche, and at the University of Heidelberg, Germany, under Professor Martin Kirschner.

In 1932, DeBakey received an M.D. degree from Tulane University School of Medicine.

DeBakey attended Tulane University, where he enrolled in a six-year program that combined undergraduate and medical school. He was awarded a Bachelor of Science degree in 1930 and a M.D. in 1932.

Michael Ellis DeBakey (September 7, 1908 – July 11, 2008) was a Lebanese-American general and cardiovascular surgeon, scientist and medical educator who became Chairman of the Department of Surgery, President, and Chancellor of Baylor College of Medicine at the Texas Medical Center in Houston, Texas. His career spanned nearly eight decades.

Michael DeBakey was born in Lake Charles, Louisiana on September 7, 1908. His parents, Shiker and Raheeja Dabaghi (the name was anglicized to DeBakey before Michael's birth) were immigrants from Marjeyoun, Lebanon (then Ottoman Syria) although they did not meet until both were living in the United States. Shiker, who had been a traveling salesman, settled in Lake Charles in the early 1900s and began to establish retail businesses, particularly general and drug stores. Both of them spoke French. Young Michael helped out with manual chores and keeping the books. DeBakey was the eldest of five children. His brother Ernest also became a physician, specializing in general and thoracic surgery. His sisters Lois and Selma were also scholarly, and eventually joined their eldest brother at Baylor College of Medicine as faculty members in medical communications. Another sister, Selena, died in 1952.