Many historic events in the evolution of cardiovascular surgery have occurred at Denton Cooley's fingertips. When this world-renowned heart surgeon was a 24-year-old resident at Johns Hopkins School of Medicine, he assisted Dr. Alfred Blalock in performing the first "blue baby" operation to correct a congenital heart defect. Cooley didn't know at the time that he was witnessing an historic development in cardiovascular surgery, but he caught on quickly.

"I realized that this was the dawn of a new specialty--and a whole new opportunity for me as a young surgeon," he says.

In the years that followed, Denton Cooley's career was marked with several medical milestones, including the first successful human heart transplant in the United States.

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