Cooley, who did first U.S. heart transplant, dies

Denton A. Cooley, a heart surgeon who performed the first successful heart transplant in the United States and helped make many other advances in cardiac surgery, including valve replacement, bypass operations, removing aortic aneurysms and the development of heart-lung machines, died Tuesday at his home in Houston. He was 96.

His death was announced by the Texas Heart Institute, which he founded in 1962, and where he continued to work until earlier this week.

As early as the 1940s, when he was a medical student at Johns Hopkins University, Cooley built a reputation as one of the most innovative and productive surgeons of his time. He assisted on the first “blue baby” operation in 1944, correcting once-fatal congenital heart defects in infants, and over the course of his career performed an estimated 100,000 surgeries.

In the 1950s, he collaborated with another Houston heart surgeon, Michael DeBakey, developing techniques in heart-bypass surgery and working on a heart-lung bypass machine, which could keep patients alive during openheart surgery. Working under the older DeBakey at the Baylor University College of Medicine in Houston, Cooley helped develop surgical methods to repair aortic aneurysms.

But the two strong-willed surgeons had an split in 1969, after Cooley performed the world’s first transplant using an artificial heart. DeBakey said the device had been developed by his own team and was, in essence, stolen by Cooley to promote his glory and in violation of medical ethics.

What no one could dispute, however, was Cooley’s sure-handed proficiency in the operating room. The 6-foot-3 onetime college basketball star improved his dexterity and precision by tying surgical knots in a small matchbox.