Dr Denton Cooley, who sparked controversy and a feud with another pioneering heart surgeon when he performed the world's first artificial heart implant in 1969, died on Friday at the age of 96, the Texas Heart Institute said. Cooley, who also performed the first successful human heart transplant in the United States, founded the Texas Heart Institute and was one of the most celebrated heart surgeons in the world.
The Texas native was also known however for a long-running dispute with another world-renowned innovative surgeon in Houston, Dr Michael DeBakey, over the implant operation. A spokeswoman for Texas Children's Hospital, where Cooley's son-in-law acts as surgeon in chief, said Cooley died in his Houston home on Friday morning, surrounded by his four daughters.
Cooley, who estimated he operated on about 100,000 people, developed many techniques used in cardiovascular surgery and received honors including the Presidential Medal of Freedom, the highest US civilian award. "Nothing can compare with the activity of the human heart," Cooley, who grew up wanting to be a dentist like his father, once told an interviewer. "And besides that, it's always had a special connotation in our society, or in our life. It's been the seat of the soul and the seat of emotions.
"But now we find that it really is a tough little organ. It can tolerate a great deal and it certainly has been revealed that it can be corrected in many ways and even replaced by organ transplantation." Cooley performed the first successful heart transplant in the United States in 1968, a year after South African Dr Christiaan Barnard had done the first one in the world.
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