Michael DeBakey

Michael Ellis DeBakey was born on September 7, 1908, in Lake Charles, Louisiana, to Lebanese immigrant parents — his father Michel Dabaghi and his mother Shaker Zorba — who had emigrated from a town near Beirut. Growing up in a cultured, educated household, DeBakey showed early brilliance and entered Tulane University's School of Medicine at the age of seventeen, receiving both his Bachelor of Science and his MD from Tulane by 1932. He completed postgraduate training in surgery in New Orleans, then in Strasbourg and Heidelberg in Europe, returning to Tulane to join the surgical faculty.

During World War II, DeBakey served in the United States Army and played a major role in reforming military medicine, advocating for mobile army surgical hospitals (MASH units) that would save countless soldiers' lives. After the war he moved to Baylor University College of Medicine in Houston, Texas, where he would remain for the rest of his life.

At Baylor, DeBakey transformed cardiovascular surgery from an experimental art into a reproducible science. He pioneered and performed the first successful resections of aortic aneurysms and reattachment using grafts, developed the Dacron graft that replaced diseased arteries, and performed some of the earliest successful carotid endarterectomies. He helped develop the heart-lung machine and the left ventricular assist device (LVAD), laying the groundwork for long-term mechanical cardiac support. He also performed some of the world's first coronary artery bypass operations.

DeBakey operated into his nineties and personally performed over 60,000 cardiovascular operations during his career. He advised presidents and kings, and was awarded the Presidential Medal of Freedom and the Congressional Gold Medal. He died on July 11, 2008, just months after undergoing — and surviving — the very aortic dissection repair procedure he had pioneered.