World Renowned Heart Surgeon Dr. Denton Cooley Dies

HOUSTON, TX -- Dr. Denton Cooley, the world renown surgeon who pioneered human heart transplants in the late 1960s and helped develop techniques for surgery on the heart and blood vessels that benefitted tens of thousands of people, died Friday at his home in Houston. He was 96.

Dr. Cooley was founder of the Texas Heart Institute and was known to have performed more than 65,000 heart operations during his long career. The institute, which confirmed his death, said he had been at work on Monday.

Dr. Cooley was born on Aug. 22, 1920, to Ralph Clarkson and Mary Fraley Cooley.

His father was a prominent Houston dentist, and his grandfather, Daniel Denton Cooley, was a founder of the Houston Heights neighborhood.

Dr. Cooley founded the Texas Heart Institute at St. Luke’s Episcopal Hospital, now recognized nationally and around the world for its many significant contributions in the fight against heart disease.

He became well known in 1968, when he performed what is believed to have been the first successful heart transplant in the United States. A year later, he performed the first implantation of a mechanical heart, which set off a decades-long feud with his mentor, Dr. Michael DeBakey, the developer of the device and then the chancellor of Baylor College of Medicine in Houston.

Before then, the two surgeons had been involved in virtually every major development in heart and blood-vessel surgery.

But the surgery performed by Dr. Cooley angered Dr. DeBakey, who accused him of committing an unethical act that had jeopardized Baylor’s federal research support because the artificial heart was still under development and not ready for use.

(The device Dr. Cooley implanted was designed to keep the patient alive until a donor heart could be secured. It worked for 64 hours, long enough for a heart to be found and Dr. Cooley to transplant it into the patient, according to The New York Times. The new heart kept the patient alive for another 32 hours, until he died of pneumonia.)

Following the episode, Dr. Cooley resigned from his post at Baylor as a full-time faculty member and the American College of Surgeons censured him for his unauthorized use of the device, which is now in the Smithsonian Institution in Washington, the Times reported.

The bitter rift between the two doctors continued for nearly 40 years until it was finally mended shortly before Dr. DeBakey’s death in 2008.

Dr. Cooley graduated from San Jacinto High School in 1937 and went on to attend the University of Texas at Austin on a basketball scholarship. He helped the team win the Southwest Conference title in 1939. He majored in zoology and graduated with honors in 1941.

He entered medical school at the UT Medical Branch at Galveston and later transferred to Johns Hopkins University in Baltimore, graduating at the top of his class in 1944.

After serving several years in the U.S. Army Medical Corps, he was discharged and in 1949, married Louise Goldborough Thomas.

In 1951, Dr. Cooley joined Baylor, where he would serve on the full-time faculty for 18 years as a professor of surgery.

Dr. Cooley last performed surgery when he was 87 but continued to serve as a consultant at Texas Children's Hospital and a surgery professor at the University of Texas Medical School at Houston.

In 1984, President Ronald Reagan awarded him the Medal of Freedom, the nation's highest civilian honor. In 1998, President Bill Clinton awarded him the National Medal of Technology, the highest honor for technological innovation in the U.S.

Other honors include the Rene Leriche Prize, the highest honor of the International Surgical Society; the National Medal of Technology; and the Boukalev Premium, Russia’s highest award for cardiovascular surgery, bestowed by the Russian Academy of Medical Science.

Dr. Cooley was preceded in death by his daughter Florence and his wife, who died last month.

His survivors include four other daughters, Mary Cooley Craddock, Dr. Susan Cooley, Dr. Louise Cooley Davis and Helen Cooley Fraser; 16 grandchildren; and 17 great-grandchildren.

Image: AndyG via Flickr