Denton Cooley

Denton Arthur Cooley was an American cardiothoracic surgeon who performed the first implantation of an artificial heart in a human and was a leading figure in the development of open-heart surgery. He founded the Texas Heart Institute and over his career performed more than 100,000 heart operations.

Cooley was born on August 22, 1920, in Houston, Texas, the son of dentist Ralph Clarkson Cooley and his wife Mary. He attended The University of Texas at Austin, where he played on the basketball team that reached the 1939 Final Four, and then studied medicine at the University of Texas Medical Branch and Johns Hopkins, graduating in 1944. He served as a US Army surgeon in occupied Austria after the war.

He trained under Alfred Blalock at Johns Hopkins, assisting on the 1944 "blue baby" operation, and worked with Russell Brock at the Brompton Hospital in London. In 1951 he returned to Houston as a faculty member at Baylor University College of Medicine alongside Michael DeBakey.

In 1962 he founded the Texas Heart Institute at St Luke's Episcopal Hospital. He performed the first successful US heart transplant in 1968 and on April 4, 1969, implanted a Liotta-designed artificial heart in patient Haskell Karp as a bridge to transplantation. He received the Presidential Medal of Freedom in 1984 and the National Medal of Technology in 1998. He died in Houston on November 18, 2016, aged 96.

His name Denton derives from an English surname meaning "valley town" from Old English denu and tūn. Denton has been used as a given name in the United States since the nineteenth century.