Completely off topic but near and dear to my profession.
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World renowned heart surgeon and medical pioneer Dr. Michael DeBakey died at the age of 99 yesterday in Texas.
While still in medical school in 1932, he invented the roller pump, which became the major component of the heart-lung machine, beginning the era of open-heart surgery. The machine takes over the function of the heart and lungs during surgery.
It was the start of a lifetime of innovation. The surgical procedures that DeBakey developed once were the wonders of the medical world. Today, they are commonplace procedures in most hospitals. He also was a pioneer in the effort to develop artificial hearts and heart pumps to assist patients waiting for transplants, and helped create more than 70 surgical instruments.
On Saturday, former colleagues and other medical professionals gathered at the still-uncompleted DeBakey Library on the Baylor College of Medicine to remember DeBakey as a "medical statesman" and perhaps the most prominent doctor in the world in the second half of the 20th century.
This matters to me because many of Dr. Debakey's findings and inventions impacted many of the surgical procedures that are performed today.
His Legacy will live forever and he will be missed.