Denton Cooley

Denton Cooley was an American cardiothoracic surgeon based in Houston, Texas, who founded and served as surgeon-in-chief of the Texas Heart Institute after training and practicing cardiovascular surgery at Baylor College of Medicine. In 1969 he implanted a total artificial heart, designed by Domingo Liotta, into a patient named Haskell Karp, who survived on the device for 65 hours before receiving a donor heart, a first in medical history. Over his career Cooley and his colleagues also developed artificial heart valves that helped cut open-heart surgery mortality from about 70 percent to 8 percent between 1962 and 1967, and he pioneered bloodless open-heart techniques for patients who could not accept blood transfusions for religious reasons.