On May 3, 1968, Denton Cooley at Baylor University College of Medicine transplanted the heart of a fifteen year old girl into a forty-seven year old man who survived for 204 days. The donor was a 15-year-old girl who had committed suicide. Although her brain had ceased to function, her heart was still beating.

Cooley’s fame spread throughout the 1960s as he applied his extraordinary dexterity to delicate surgery on the hearts of infants with congenital heart disease. He was the first surgeon to successfully remove pulmonary embolisms, squeezing the lungs flat to remove the inaccessible blood clots.

Dr. Cooley and his colleagues also pursued the development of artificial heart valves. From 1962 to 1967, the mortality rate for valve transplant patients fell from 70 percent to eight percent. In 1967, the International Surgical Society awarded Dr. Cooley its highest honor, the Renée Lebiche Prize. In its citation, the Society called him “the most valuable surgeon of the heart and blood vessels anywhere in the world.”

The establishment of the Denton A. Cooley Cardiovascular Surgical Foundation was seen in 1972 — an organization of surgeons trained by Dr. Cooley — and the dedication of the 29-story Texas Heart Institute building in Houston, where Dr. Cooley performed as many as 25 heart operations in a single day.