NEW YORK CITY, Nov. 5 -- Legendary cardiologist and ingenious medical inventor Dr. Michael E. DeBakey was presented with the 17th Annual Glorney-Raisbeck Award on Nov. 2 at the Academy in recognition of his distinguished contributions to cardiology and heart surgery that have prolonged the lives of probably millions of ailing patients. The nearly 200 people in Hosack Hall for the occasion gave 97-year-old DeBakey a well-deserved standing ovation after his captivating lecture on "The Development of Cardiovascular Surgery." This presentation reviewed the remarkable lifesaving developments for treating heart ailments in the last century, many of which DeBakey was responsible for or involved with.

"I'm very appreciative of this honor you’ve accorded me," DeBakey humbly said upon accepting the Glorney-Raisbeck medal from Academy President Dr. Jeremiah A. Barondess. DeBakey, who is the Chancellor Emeritus of the Baylor College of Medicine in Houston and Director of the DeBakey Heart Center at Baylor, said he reviewed the list of previous awardees and "I feel greatly honored to now have my name listed among them. I have the highest esteem for their accomplishments."

DeBakey is an international legend in the field of medicine, in part for performing the first-ever-successful coronary artery bypass surgery. This procedure is today standard fare for U.S. heart patients but was revolutionary just 50 years ago. The surgery is needed when blood no longer flows freely through clogged arteries leading to the heart muscle, a potentially fatal problem. Surgeons remove a healthy, clear vein from elsewhere in the patient’s body (often the leg) and attach it to the heart muscle to create a detour around the blocked artery. DeBakey was first to achieve clinical success performing this surgery in 1964.

"When I was a resident in New Orleans, if a patient came in having a heart attack, chances are he did not leave that hospital alive," DeBakey said. "Today, if a patient comes in with a heart attack, his chances of leaving the hospital are better than 95 percent, as is the chance of returning to a normal life."

DeBakey explained to the audience that fate definitely played a role in his being "first" to perform a successful bypass. His colleague actually performed the first bypass in 1962, but the patient died two days later of a stroke, so the procedure made little impact on the outside world, DeBakey said. DeBakey’s patient two years later fared much better. "The graft of this patient continued to function for 24 years," he said proudly. The operation is today commonly performed on three or four arteries at one time (triple or quadruple bypass), and many Americans claim at least one friend or relative who has undergone this surgery.

DeBakey had been involved in developing early models of the artificial heart, and told the audience that his 1963 Senate testimony led to $10 million being budgeted for research into creating one. But DeBakey said he ultimately stopped working on this project because animals were being injured in the research. Instead, he refocused his efforts on ventricular devices. In the ‘80s, DeBakey made a monumental contribution to heart patients’ health when he invented the Ventricular Assist Device (VAD), an implantable pump that increases blood flow from the left ventricle of the heart, throughout the body. The DeBakey VAD is an "actual flow" device, he explained, in which a magnetic field turns the impeller blades and allows blood to flow through without the need for electricity. This device has helped restore normal function to many patients’ failing hearts.

"What’s really heartening is you see people who couldn’t get out of bed, now exercising," DeBakey told the audience of physicians, students and other medical professionals. "It clearly demonstrates how useful this device is." The VAD greatly improved quality of life for patients in end-stage heart failure, and a miniaturized version is small enough to be implanted in women and children.

DeBakey, who volunteered for military service in World War II and served under the Surgeon General as Chief of the Surgical Consultants Division, also made significant contributions to the care of soldiers, whose medical needs he witnessed firsthand. DeBakey conceived the idea of the M.A.S.H. unit to provide staged emergency medical treatment to soldiers on the front lines. These "mobile army surgical hospitals" were instituted in the Korean War and immortalized in the long-running television series, "M.A.S.H." DeBakey is also responsible for the creation of the Veterans Affairs Medical Center system. At the end of World War II, he recommended that specialized medical centers be established throughout the United States to treat wounded soldiers returning from war. The VA Hospital in Houston bears his name.

DeBakey’s lecture reviewed the history of the development of cardiovascular surgery in the 1900s. For him, a good part of this was a walk down memory lane of what has been an unbelievably productive life. He began by showing an image from1896 of the first postmortem angiogram, of a hand; and then a 1928 image of the first "abdominal aortogram" taken by Dr. Raynaldo Dos Santos. DeBakey said DosSantos told him he was scolded at a meeting in France for "endangering the patient's life" by performing this procedure – a demonstration of the perils faced by trailblazing surgeons. DeBakey then showed a 1948 image taken by Dr. Robert Gross of a homograft replacement he performed on a patient with coarctation of the aorta, basically a narrowing of the blood vessels. "This work had a great influence on me," DeBakey said. Gross’s experimental use of a homograft to replace the aorta charted the course of DeBakey’s career.

In 1952, DeBakey treated a patient who had aneurysm of the descending thoracic aorta. "He was in severe pain," recalled DeBakey, who decided to attempt resecting the aorta and replacing it with a homograft. "I explained to him we'd never done this in the chest, but the same procedure could be used, " DeBakey said. He proceeded to replace the faulty stretch of aorta with a 15-cm-long graft. Two years later, DeBakey performed the same procedure on a patient plagued by an ascending aortic aneurysm. He called both patients, pioneers. "They were the first cases to have aneurysm bypasses successfully done," DeBakey said. (While the surgeries went as planned, both patients ultimately died of cancer).

A story that DeBakey shared with the audience illustrated his great genius, creativity and innovation. Back in 1952, he heard that a Columbia University scientist had used "Vinyon-N" cloth to create homografts and replace an inferior material that had been in use. Vinyon was not yet commercially available, so DeBakey went to the store asking for nylon, the closest material to Vinyon. The store did not have nylon but had a "new material" called Dacron that DeBakey said he'd never heard of. "It looked good, felt good, so I bought a yard of it and I began to work on it," DeBakey said. He made the first Dacron graft tube on his wife's sewing machine that year. "I had the good fortune I had a mother who taught me how to sew." The tubes proved highly successful in animals and were ultimately mass-produced.

DeBakey is still quite spry and passionately involved in his life’s work. Most days, according to Academy President Dr. Barondess, he walks around in his scrubs at Baylor, the institutional base for most of his great accomplishments. Even at age 97, he is full of energy: DeBakey arrived by plane late Wednesday afternoon for this event, and returned to Texas at 4 a.m. Thursday.

"It’s just been a privilege to have you here," Barondess said upon presenting DeBakey with the Glorney-Raisbeck medal. "Thank you for the wonderful survey you’ve given us tonight."

Posted on 11/05/2005

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Malini Doddamani
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