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11 t m c » p u l s e | m ay 2 0 1 9 'Yeah, I go up there in my office and sleep three or four hours. I'll be fine.' I [asked] one night, 'Why do you do all this?' He said, 'My patients are my life.' You got to love a guy like that. Q | Frazier and Cohn wanted to work with Daniel Timms, Ph.D., creator of BiVACOR, a next-generation total artificial heart designed to replace the function of a patient's failing heart. You decided to invest $2.1 million to bring Timms from Australia to Houston. What motivated you to get involved with BiVACOR and the team? A | At the end of the day, it's all about patients. If we can do something through BiVACOR that helps people live longer, healthier lives and get back their quality of life, then I've done some- thing good for the world. I'm not going to be here forever, so my wife and I both want to try to leave a legacy. What we need is somebody to invent a battery that can power this artificial heart through the skin without having to have wires coming out, because those wires cause infection and they limit a person's lifestyle. If any aspiring entrepreneur at the Texas Medical Center wants to invent a battery that can power that heart through the skin, let me know. That would be a great movement forward in the BiVACOR artificial heart business. According to Billy and Bud, in the next year or two, they can get it implanted in a human and we'll see what happens. Lots of history at the Texas Medical Center and, thanks to Daniel Timms, Dr. Frazier and Dr. Cohn, hopefully they'll make some more. Q | Your daughter, Elizabeth McIngvale, Ph.D., serves as an assistant professor of psychiatry and behavioral sciences at Baylor College of Medicine and is an active mental health advocate who was diagnosed with severe obsessive compulsive disor- der (OCD) when she was 13 years old. At the time, some doctors said her condition was too severe to be treated. How did you respond to that? A | My wife and I are eternal optimists. One way or another, we weren't buying the prognosis that our child would never amount to anything, that she would never graduate high school, that it was best to put her in a mental institution for the rest of her life. We weren't buying that and we were going to find a way. ➟ Q | You and your family moved from Starkville, Mississippi, where you were born, to Dallas, Texas, when you were three years old. Then you relocated to Houston in 1981 to open Gallery Furniture. What brought you to Houston? A | My wife [Linda] and I came down here with $5,000 and the hope that we could make some- thing happen. And, by golly, we're still here all these years later. We were working together at this fitness center, and then we were dating. I told her I was going to move down to start this furniture store and I asked her to come with me and help me do it. She said, 'I'll only do that if you marry me.' We got married and here we are. It's been happily ever after for 38 years. Q | In 1990, a doctor walked into Gallery Furniture to ask for your help. That doc- tor was Billy Cohn, M.D., chief emergency resident at Ben Taub Hospital at the time, now vice president for Johnson & Johnson Medical Devices Companies and the exec- utive director of the Center for Device Innovation at the Texas Medical Center. Tell me about your initial encounter with him. A | I was up here working and this surgeon walks in in his surgical scrubs. He's got blood all over him. It was Billy. He hadn't shaved in three or four days. He says, 'Hey, we've got the new Ben Taub Hospital and the county's run out of money, so all of the people that are waiting in the emergency room while their loved ones are being operated on are having to sit on the floor. Can you get us some recliners?' I said, 'How many do you need?' He said, 'We need a whole truckload, 40 or 50 or something.' I said, 'Sure, I'll get them for you.' I got him all those recliners and we shipped them down there to Ben Taub, but they wouldn't take them. They didn't have hospital foam in them, so they weren't flame retardant. That's why I remember the story. They sent them back to us. He called very apologetic. We called and ordered them with hospital foam and got them back down there to him. Q | You encountered Cohn again in 2008 when your brother, George, was suffering from congestive heart failure. A | My brother was very sick, and I was down there at St. Luke's to have a meeting with Dr. [Bud] Frazier about how they were going to save my brother's life. Billy walked in with Bud. I would be down there visiting my brother at 12, 1, 2 o'clock in the morning after I got off work, and I'd be kneeling by his bedside. Even though he was in a coma, he knew I was there because we were very close. And Bud would come in there and check his charts and nurture him. Bud would talk to me, and I would say, 'Dr. Frazier, it's 2 o'clock in the morning. What time do you operate tomorrow?' And he said, 'I operate at six.' I said, 'Do you ever sleep?' He said,