DeBakey was born September 7 1908; Michel Dabaghi (later anglicized to DeBakey) in Lake Charles, Louisiana. He was the oldest of four children whose parents emigrated as children themselves from Lebanon to the United States. His father was the owner of two drug stores in Lake Charles. DeBakey believed the doctors who patronized his father's pharmacy probably triggered his early interest in medicine. At age 20, the legendary surgeon Alton Ochsner, took the brilliant young medical student under his wing and encouraged an interest in surgery.  At age 23, Blakely invented the roller pump, while still in medical school at Tulane University. The significance wasn’t realized until 20 years later, when it became an essential component of the heart-lung machine. The pump provided a continuous flow of blood during operations. This invention made open-heart surgery possible. In the 1960s, DeBakey and his team of surgeons were among the first to record surgeries on film. DeBakey performed his first bypass operation in 1964, with the now routine method that uses a leg vein to re-route blood around a blocked coronary artery. He carried out 12 early heart transplants after the surgical triumph of another former student, Christiaan Barnard, in 1967. But he was one of the surgeons to call a halt to the technique because of the organ rejection dilemma. In 1968, DeBakey developed a device called a left ventricular assist device (LVAD) to help the heart to pump blood. The LVAD supported the main pumping chamber of the heart and caused some heart surgeons to consider the possibility of a mechanism that might assist the heart, and actually replace it. In 1969, he made history by giving a patient an artificial heart. In 1982, he teamed up with Robert Jarvik to implant one of his (Jarvik artificial hearts) in Barney Clarke, who survived for several months. DeBakey continued his experimental work and concentrated on looking for devices to assist rather than replace failing hearts. DeBakey was prompted to work on a miniature heart by one of his patients, a Nasa Engineer who put him in touch with engineers. They designed the space shuttle fuel pumps, and suggested a very different approach.  Nasa's supercomputers helped create a device the size of a fountain pen, powered by a battery pack worn around the waist. It was the first axial-flow pump to be used in heart patients. DeBakey’s colleagues used the tiny surrogate hearts for patients who would have died waiting on a transplant donor. DeBakey continued his research into the 90’s. DeBakey operated on more than 50,000 patients, including several heads of state and created more than 70 surgical instruments.