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His father, Shaker Morris DeBakey, 80 this week, came to the U.S. from Lebanon when he was 15. By the time his son Michael was in high school, Shaker DeBakey owned a drugstore where the boy helped out and nourished the desire—acquired years earlier—to become a doctor. From his father, says Mike DeBakey, he learned his early-rising habits, the absolute abhorrence of wasted time that has marked his en tire career. His mother, whom DeBakey remembers as "the most compassionate and sweetest person I've ever known," also contributed to his career. She taught her two sons and four daughters how to sew with precision—a facility for which Mike and his brother Ernest, who is a surgeon in Mobile, Ala., are forever grateful.
Banana Breakfast. A straight-A student, DeBakey raced through Tulane for both his B.S. and M.D. degrees, stayed to get an M.S. for research on peptic ulcer. He got appointments to the universities of Strasbourg and Heidelberg, where he also continued courting Diana Cooper, a pretty nurse whom he had met in New Orleans before she went to the American Hospital in Paris. After Europe and marriage, it was back to Tulane to the department of surgery under Dr. Alton Ochsner.* During the '30s, young Dr. DeBakey became an expert in blood transfusions and invented a roller pump to assist them. That pump, he thought wistfully, might some day be useful in some sort of heart-lung machine to sustain a patient during surgery. Twenty years later it was.
Wartime service in the Army surgeon general's office gave Colonel DeBakey a chance to become an exacting critic of the quality of surgery, and in 1948 he moved to Houston with misgivings. Baylor's College of Medicine was just sorting itself out from the shambles of a wartime move from Dallas, and it was difficult to find a hospital surgical service with enough patients for DeBakey's practice and teaching. But he found a powerful ally in a retiring millionaire, Ben Taub, and soon got a major hospital program rolling. DeBakey and Taub are still fast friends, and breakfast together every Sunday.
Every other day in the week, breakfast is no more than coffee and a banana. By 5, DeBakey is at work in his den, the one room in his comfortable Regency house to which not even his wife or the maid has a key. The huge horseshoe-shaped desk (like almost everything else that DeBakey owns, it is the gift of a grateful patient) is crammed with stacked lantern slides of diseased arteries, patients' histories, statistical analyses of the results of thousands of operations, reprints of reports by other surgeons, masses of correspondence, and a tiny portable TV. If DeBakey switches it on, it is only to have it remind him when it is 6:30 and time to head for the hospital.
If, as is usually the case, DeBakey is in a jam between journeys to far cities or foreign lands, he spends the dawn hours writing scientific papers in longhand. He finds that the time it takes to write makes him use words with the precision that is so precious to him. If he has a day or two to spare before a speech or manuscript is due, DeBakey dictates to a tape recorder and later revises the typed draft. His professional bibliography now numbers no fewer than 619 scientific reports.