HOUSTON, July 12: Surgeon Michael DeBakey, whose ground-breaking heart transplants and coronary bypass operations made him one of the giants of 20th century medicine, has died at age 99.

The Baylor College of Medicine and Methodist Hospital said DeBakey died on Friday of natural causes. Methodist Hospital in Houston was his primary surgical hospital for many years.

In a career that spanned more than seven decades, DeBakey developed a number of new surgical procedures that now are standard in treating heart ailments and led many to consider him the father of modern cardiovascular surgery.

His innovation was the now-common coronary bypass operation for clogged arteries, which he first performed in 1964, using leg veins to bypass blocked or damaged areas between the aorta and coronary arteries.

“He has improved the human condition and touched the lives of generations to come,” said Ron Girotto, president of the Methodist Hospital system.

DeBakey, the Louisiana-born son of Lebanese immigrants, was still a student at Tulane University in New Orleans in 1932 when he created the roller pump, which would be a critical component of the heart-lung machine that helped make open-heart surgery possible.

During World War Two, DeBakey served in the Surgeon General’s office and was credited with developing the mobile Army surgical hospitals — MASH units — that moved medical care closer to the battle lines and hastened treatment of wounded soldiers.

In 1953, using his wife’s sewing machine, he fashioned out of Dacron the first artificial artery for repairing damaged arteries in a surgery he pioneered.

DeBakey became a medical celebrity in the 1960s when surgeons developed treatments such as heart transplants that captured the fancy of the press and public.

In 1996, DeBakey helped treat Boris Yeltsin, sitting in as a consultant while his former student Renat Akchurin performed quintuple bypass surgery on the Russian president, who called him “a magician of the heart.”

In May 1965, he was on the cover of Time magazine and as his reputation grew, DeBakey was sought out by ailing world leaders.—Reuters