Dead Celebrity Alert

July 12 (Bloomberg) — Michael DeBakey, the Texas cardiovascular surgeon who developed heart-bypass procedures that improved the lives of millions of patients and prolonged life for others, died yesterday in Houston of natural causes.

He died at age 99, two years and five months after himself becoming among the world’s oldest survivor of an operation he had devised, Baylor College of Medicine and The Methodist Hospital confirmed in a statement.

During seven decades, DeBakey’s advances helped prevent heart attacks and strokes as he developed surgical methods that later became widespread. He also designed dozens of medical devices, such as the heart pump, and trained thousands of surgeons, mostly at the Baylor College of Medicine in Houston, which posted a memorial of DeBakey on the home page of its Web site. … Read full obituary

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