AUSTIN, Texas — Fifty-four years ago, on April 4, 1969, a heart surgeon who got his early training at the University of Texas at Austin accomplished what many thought could never be done – implanting the first mechanical heart in a human patient.
It was a long way from the Longhorn basketball court, where young zoology student Denton Cooley was a star athlete in the class of 1939, to the revolution he brought to the healing of the damaged heart.
From that day in 1969 forward, Dr. Cooley, a heart surgeon known for his skill and innovations, and his team – including, for a time, his colleague, Dr. Michael DeBakey – would put Houston on the map as the premier place in the world to repair hearts.
While a purely artificial heart was then and is today impractical to be used in a patient on a long-term basis, it is an effective temporary bridge for a patient waiting for a human heart transplant. However, partial mechanical hearts worn long-term are keeping patients alive today.
Meantime, a major crisis facing a patient in need of a transplant is the fact that far more people need them than there are hearts available.
"We should be transplanting organs and not burying them," said Dr. Rick Snyder, a Dallas cardiologist and president-elect of the Texas Medical Association. “We have the science. We have the hospitals. We have the medical insurance, but we don't have enough organs.”
Snyder has been working on legislation that would make being an organ donor in Texas an “opt-out” rather than “opt-in” situation – that is, Texas residents would automatically become organ donors upon their deaths unless they opt out from a state organ donor registry.