Heart pioneer DeBakey gets top civilian honor

WASHINGTON – Congress approved the nation's top civilian honor Monday for Texas heart surgeon Michael DeBakey, the 99-year-old medical pioneer whose breakthroughs have saved millions of lives, including his own.

"If we did not have a Congressional Gold Medal, we would have to create one to honor the honorable Dr. Michael DeBakey," said Rep. Al Green, D-Houston, before the House voted unanimously to award the medal.

Dr. DeBakey has performed more than 60,000 surgeries and trained generations of doctors at Baylor College of Medicine. In 1964, he performed the first successful coronary bypass. At age 97, he became one of 10,000 or so patients and counting saved by surgery to repair a torn aorta – a condition that is almost always fatal but for the procedure he devised.

Mr. Green, Rep. Michael Burgess, R-Flower Mound, and another sponsor, Rep. John Culberson, R-Houston, spoke with Dr. DeBakey by phone after the House vote.

He expressed "deep appreciation," a Burgess aide said, and told them: "I have always been proud to be an American citizen." Dr. DeBakey's parents were born in Lebanon.

Dr. Burgess, one of a handful of physicians in Congress, noted that many lawmakers weren't yet born when Dr. DeBakey made his earliest advances in cardiac treatment.

"His contributions to medicine and his breakthrough surgery and innovative devices have completely transformed our view of the human body and of our longevity," Dr. Burgess said.

The Senate approved the DeBakey medal on March 27, and President Bush is expected to sign it into law. It will take months to design and strike the medal, and a ceremony probably will be held before then in Houston, where Dr. DeBakey is chancellor emeritus at Baylor's medical school.

Dr. DeBakey will join an elite list of gold medalists that includes Dr. Jonas Salk, who developed the polio vaccine, George Washington, the Wright Brothers, Winston Churchill, Nelson Mandela and, a year ago, Texas golf legend Byron Nelson.