Denton Cooley, MD, the surgeon who performed the first successful human heart transplant in the United States, died Nov. 15 at age 96.
The Texas Heart Institute, which Dr. Cooley founded in 1962, announced his death and did not specify the cause.
Dr. Cooley completed the United States' first successful human heart transplant in 1968 on a 47-year-old man. At the time, heart transplants were controversial as religious and spiritual leaders questioned whether life ended when your brain ceased to function or heart stopped beating. In an interview with Life magazine, Dr. Cooley said he saw the heart as "a servant of the brain," according to The Washington Post.
Over the course of his career, Dr. Cooley and his team performed more than 120,000 open-heart operations.
This was not without controversy. Heart surgeon Michael DeBakey, MD, collaborated with Dr. Cooley at Baylor University College of Medicine in the 1950s on new techniques for heart-bypass surgery and creation of a heart-lung bypass machine. The two surgeons split in a highly publicized conflict in 1969, one year after Dr. Cooley performed the world's first transplant with an artificial heart. Dr. DeBakey claimed Dr. Cooley and his team stole the artificial heart his team developed. They eventually reconciled in 2007, but Dr. DeBakey died one year later.
Dr. Cooley earned his medical degree from Johns Hopkins School of Medicine, where he completed his internship as well. He served as an associate professor of surgery at Baylor College of Medicine, and spent time working at Methodist Hospital and St. Luke's Episcopal Hospital, both in Houston.
The medical pioneer played a hand in other medical milestones apart from the landmark heart surgery. For instance, as an intern, he assisted in the first "blue-baby" operation, which corrected a heart defect that stopped a baby from getting enough oxygen.
But Dr. Cooley believed his major professional accomplishment was the creation of the THI — of which he served as surgeon-in-chief for more than 40 years — and developing a school of surgery. Today, more than 800 surgeons are members of the Denton A. Cooley Cardiovascular Surgical Society.