Issue link: https://tmcpulse.uberflip.com/i/308706
t m c » p u l s e | m a y 7, 2 0 1 4 14 "In my opinion, Dr. Cooley is the best heart surgeon who has ever lived. He also has a very gracious personality. I watched him successfully perform countless cardiac repairs in the oper- ating room—procedures that no other surgeon could even have attempted. He would do as many as 15 open heart operations in one day. Normally, doing three such cases in one day is a big job. But Dr. Cooley would just sail through the operative schedule. No one in history has been his equal. Without his contributions, heart surgery would not be what it is today." Frazier began his experimental research immediately upon joining THI in the late 1970s. In 1986, he suc- cessfully implanted a pulsatile heart assist device as a bridge to transplan- tation. In 1994, the Food and Drug Administration (FDA) approved this device as the first for the bridge-to- transplant use. In 1991, he implanted the first electrically powered, unteth- ered assist device, which allowed a patient to leave the hospital and lead an active life while waiting for a heart transplant. This device was the first approved by the FDA for "destination," not bridge-to-transplant, therapy. Frazier was an early champion of the continuous-flow pump as a heart assist device. In 1988, he was the first to implant the Hemopump, the first totally implantable, continuous-flow device, which he developed with an engineer named Rich Wampler. Its design, based on the concept of the Archimedes screw, results in "pulseless" (or contin- uous) blood flow. "The Hemopump was considered the 'Kitty Hawk' of continu- ous-flow device development, and it showed that a device spinning at 25,000 rpm could be safely implanted in the human circulatory system." Frazier was also working simulta- neously with another engineer, Rob Jarvik, to develop a long-term, con- tinuous-flow pump. In 2000, Frazier successfully implanted this device in a patient.