by Jason S. Bardi

Approaching 1:00 a.m. on Monday morning, I am wondering if I will get my first blog post finished (’twas due 45 minutes ago). I have that desperation that anyone who is up past midnight has, and because of this, coupled with the fact that the story I am telling concerns a discovery also made past midnight, I am dedicating this column to all the artists, writers, scientists, and other crazy creative people who stay up late troubling over great things.

This is the story of Planet Ceres, the Prince of Dwarves. You may have heard Ceres’ name mentioned about a month ago, when the brouhaha over Pluto’s status erupted again. I am not going to say much about Pluto other than to point out the obvious: its drama is a human drama and has very little to do with the planet itself. Pluto is an inanimate object. It hurtles out there, beyond the orbit of Neptune. It lies so far away from fickle human categorization that even if it had consciousness, a personality (“that Pluto’s a hellofa guy”), it would be safely immune from hurt feelings. Pluto has no personality. It is a rock. How could it care what happens here on Earth?

We humans care a great deal. The big news, about a month ago, was that Pluto was reclassified again. Once a planet, it had been classified a dwarf planet two years ago. This story got an overwhelming media response. Then in June it was reclassified as a “plutoid.” This time around, the story also garnered a fair bit of media attention — if for no other reason than many reporters seem amused that the chosen name was plutoid. “Such a (not) graceful term,” declared MIT’s Knight Science Journalism Tracker, which also summarized the major coverage of the event in the wires and dailies. See here.

ABC’s Ned Potter summed it up well in his blog when he said: “The goal of science is to understand and categorize the universe, and new categories are needed as our understanding of the universe changes…”

“But…Plutoid?”

This is not the story of Pluto. Instead, this is the story of another rock caught in the renaming game — one much closer to earth and with an interesting history of its own.

What you may have heard about Ceres is what the IAU said in its official Pluto release. “The dwarf planet Ceres is not a plutoid,” the release says, “as it is located in the asteroid belt between Mars and Jupiter.” (Plutoids are objects further than Neptune).

What you may not have read about Ceres is how it was discovered there, between the orbits of Mars and Jupiter, more than 200 years ago. By the way, this story is an excerpt (including extensive unused material) from my forthcoming book The Fifth Postulate (Wiley, 2008). Pre-order your copy on Amazon today!

With no further ado, here is a story I like to call:

The Once and Future Prince of Dwarves

One of the greatest discoveries of the nineteenth century was also perhaps its earliest. It was just after midnight on New Year’s Day 1801, and an Italian monk and astronomer named Giuseppe Piazzi was up late searching the skies from his rooftop observatory in Palermo, Sicily. He saw something that night that would change his life forever. Peering through his telescope, he spotted an object, watched it for several nights, carefully recorded its location as it traversed the sky, and eventually lost track of it.

Piazzi wasn’t sure what he was looking at. Was it a comet? His letters indicated that he thought it could be—perhaps a comet without a tail. He hoped, though, that it was something else, something “better than a comet,” as he wrote. What exactly qualifies as better-than-comet status? Just what Piazzi was intending to find: a new planet.

Finding a new planet was, in fact, one of the great scientific quests of the day. It was a completely new and exciting endeavor, and Piazzi and others were not just looking for any new planet. They were looking for the “missing” planet. The ancients knew of only five planets other than Earth — Mercury, Venus, Mars, Jupiter, and Saturn. But the scientific world had been turned on its head in 1781 when William Herschel at his private observatory in Bath, England, spotted something he thought could be a star or a comet. It turned out to be the new planet Uranus.

This raised the possibility that there might be even more undiscovered planets in the solar system. J. D. Titus and J. E. Bode gave this possibility a firm theoretical basis by forwarding an idea that there logically must be a planet between Jupiter and Mars. The basis of their claim was their observation that the six known planets followed an orderly, even spacing, thus suggesting that all the planets should be so spaced. But the gap between Mars and Jupiter was about twice what would be predicted by their theory. The emptiness was deafening.

By the turn of the eighteenth century, astronomers had been looking for a planet between Mars and Jupiter for several years, and the search was heating up. Baron Franz Xaver von Zach, the court astronomer at Gotha, began a formal, systematic search involving a team of astronomers. Piazzi, in his observatory in Sicily, was one of a group of twenty-four astronomers in Europe who made up this team. With such a large force of astronomers gearing up to look for the missing planet, Piazzi must have been surprised when he hit pay dirt quickly that New Year’s Day, spotting his object in orbit around the sun between Mars and Jupiter, exactly where the missing planet should have been.

Piazzi continued to track the object as long as he could, but he became ill on February 11, presumably from too many sleepless January nights exposed to the elements. In any case, the object passed behind the sun, and he lost sight of it. Piazzi had already sent letters that January to the directors of the observatories in Paris, Berlin, and Milan, telling them that he had discovered a small comet with no tail—or something—and giving them the coordinates. By then, Piazzi had decided to presumptively name his object. He called it Cerere Ferdinandea, combining the names of a Roman goddess of the harvest with his own Sicilian king. We know this object by its more common name: Ceres. In one of the letters, he was bold enough to suggest that it might be a planet.

By that summer, word had gotten around. The discovery was announced with excitement in a long article in a leading German astronomy journal edited by Baron von Zach. This was “a long supposed, now probably discovered, new major planet of our solar system between Mars and Jupiter,” wrote von Zach.

For the discovery to be meaningful, however, this mysterious new planet had to be located again. The only problem was, nobody knew exactly where to find Ceres. It had disappeared, and this started one of the great hunts in the history of astronomy. Astronomers, professional and amateur alike, began scanning the skies with telescopes to locate the mysterious new rock — all without success. Ceres was still there, of course, rounding its way around the sun. But where?

This was a wonderful problem in applied mathematics. Mathematics alone could (and eventually would) locate the planet if it could be used to compute Ceres’s orbit. Then, given the orbit of Ceres, astronomers of the day could locate the missing planet by simply searching along the path where they knew it should be. But how could mathematicians determine the orbit?

Perhaps the easiest way, in theory, would be to chart enough of it—making careful observations of its exact location in the sky night after night as it made its journey around the sun. If you were able to observe enough positions of Ceres on enough nights, and if you were able to record the observations, you would have enough of a plot of its actual orbit to be able to fill in the gaps.

What if all you had was enough data to fill one tiny gap? How could you determine the orbit of Ceres if there was only a limited amount of available orbital data? This was exactly the situation in which mathematicians and astronomers found themselves in 1801. Piazzi had carefully recorded the position of Ceres on several nights over a period of forty-one days from his observatory in Sicily.

Many astronomers of the day reasoned that it would still be possible to calculate the entire orbit from these observations. They could estimate its orbit, and from that they could determine where Ceres should be by calculating how far it would have traveled since Piazzi last saw it. One would then have to simply point a telescope to the location farther along this path where it should be.

With that in mind, an astronomer named Johann Karl Burckhardt used the tools of “celestial mechanics” as they were known and published a preliminary orbit of Ceres in July. In September von Zach published the complete set of observations made by Piazzi. They were both hopeful that this would be enough. It was not.

The difficulty was that prior to the discovery of Ceres, celestial mechanics had only been successfully applied to predicting the orbits of comets. Comets are much brighter than planetary bodies and may be visible for a longer period of time on their approach to the sun. They are easier to handle, in other words. Ceres is not bright enough to be visible to the naked eye, so it had to be spotted with a telescope. This greatly limited the area of the sky that could be systematically searched.

Computing the orbit of Ceres was exceedingly difficult because recording observations taken over just a few weeks only gives you a few closely spaced points on the overall path of the object around the sun. Such a small piece of the orbit confounded any attempt to extrapolate the entire orbit because small errors in the observations could have massive effects on the overall calculation.

A month after Baron von Zach published Piazzi’s full set of observations, he reported the sad news that several astronomers had been looking for Ceres in the previous two months without success. Burckhardt’s efforts to plot the orbit had failed. Such was the desperate state of affairs when the Ceres data reached Gauss sometime in the fall of 1801.

Gauss was not an astronomer in the regular early-nineteenth-century sense. He had neither telescope nor observatory. But, being adept at pushing pencils around on a desk, he was perfectly suited to tackle this problem. In 1801, when Ceres swept across Gauss’s radar, he pushed everything else aside, picked up his pencil, and went to work.

“Could I ever have found a more seasonable opportunity to test the practical value of my conceptions, that now employing them for the determination of the orbit of the planet Ceres, which after the lapse of a year must be looked for in a region off the heavens very remote from that in which it was last seen?” Gauss wrote.

By November 1801, he began making notes on the problem, and by the end of the month he had solved it, working out a solution to a system of seventeen equations that predicted where Ceres would be. He communicated his calculated orbit to von Zach, and in December von Zach published the predicted orbit, writing, “Great hope for help and facilitation is accorded to us by the recently shared investigation and calculation of Dr. Gauss in Brunswick.”

By then, astronomers were already searching the skies for Ceres, looking where Gauss predicted it would be. Winter weather being what it was, they were not immediately successful. On December 7, however, von Zach located the planet almost exactly where Gauss predicted it would be, as Gauss himself wrote, on “the first clear night, when the planet was sought for as directed by the numbers deduced from it, restored the fugitive to observation.”

The secret to Gauss’s success was a technique he invented called the method of least squares, which is a way of minimizing the error of observations. The problem, as Gauss saw it, was to determine the orbit by finding a curve that corresponded with the observed data and then correct the curve to find the best fit. The method of least squares helps by approximating an orbit based on the few observations and then improving, or “fitting,” the orbit to the data. The fitting works by minimizing the differences between the observed and computed points in the orbit multiplied by themselves (thus “least squares”). It was a simple but remarkable discovery.

The truly remarkable thing about Gauss, though, is that when he invented the method of least squares, he didn’t think much of it. He didn’t even bother to publish it because it was so obvious to him that he was convinced some other mathematician had surely thought of it already! In fact, other mathematicians did develop the method of least squares independent of Gauss, including the French mathematician Adrien-Marie Legendre, who was also the first to publish the method and was subsequently recognized as its inventor.

Gauss was overjoyed about the rediscovery of Ceres, and his enthusiasm was echoed by dozens of his contemporaries, many of whom had been trying to do just what he had done. In his overly humble way, he was careful not to promote himself too aggressively, and he credited much older mathematicians like Isaac Newton for working out the theoretical foundations upon which he laid his mathematical prediction.

Nevertheless, the calculation launched Gauss to fame and elevated him to a stature on a par with the top astronomers in Europe. When Alexander von Humboldt returned to Europe from the United States in 1804, he went immediately to Paris, cosmopolitan capital that it was. There he was impressed to find a name of a young German mathematician mentioned over and over as one of the great geniuses of the day.

Gauss’s rediscovery of Ceres had a profound effect on his personal and professional life. He soon gained membership in numerous scientific societies, and by the time he died, he would be a member of all the major societies in Europe. He began to spend more and more time on astronomical observations, carefully following planets and comets and watching eclipses. On many nights during the next half century, he could be found late at night observing the stars through his telescope and taking measurements with his sextant and recording all. He named his firstborn son Joseph, after Piazzi.

Ceres, on the other hand, did not fare so well.

Astronomers were astonished by the discovery of a similar object they called Pallas a few months later. Two years after that another, named Juno, was spotted. All three were in orbit around the sun at approximately the same distance. Yet another object like them, called Vesta, was discovered soon thereafter.

These discoveries had a tremendous effect on popular astronomy. Some would watch the skies for years afterward, hoping to make a similar discovery. All of this was in vain. It was decades before more of these objects were discovered. They were not really planets at all, but object we would have called asteroids, a word that the astronomer William Herschel coined because objects like it appeared like stars in his telescope.

In the second half of the nineteenth century, astronomers began spotting them in droves—hundreds more by the end of the century. A single photograph taken in 1900 revealed five entirely new ones. By the early twentieth century, there were so many known asteroids that they were regarded as dull curiosities or worse—annoyances. They stood in the way of observations of distant solar systems and were themselves uninteresting.

Later in the twentieth century this changed again. Asteroids are now the focus of important geological questions because they are representatives of the early solar system. Ceres is a special example of this. It was formed within ten million years or so after the birth of the solar system. It is a throwback to an earlier time in the solar system—a primordial planetoid 600 miles in diameter. It is a remnant of the cloud of matter that collapsed and formed our solar system nearly five billion years ago.

Perhaps Ceres was inappropriately named. In ancient myth, Ceres was the Roman goddess of plants, but there is nothing organic about her namesake. It is a rock and nothing more, with no atmosphere and no life. Ceres is smaller than the Earth and much smaller than Jupiter and the other giant planets, and smaller even than the moons scattered throughout the solar system. Ceres and the rest of the objects in the asteroid belt never really had a chance to pull together because of the gravity of the solar system. Blame Jupiter, the biggest of the planets and gravitationally speaking the most influential. Ceres and the other thousands of asteroids were caught between the gravitational pull of it and the sun.

Ceres is similar to the icy moons of the outer planets. Its diameter is about a quarter that of Earth’s moon, and it circles the sun in 4.6 years. What is most interesting about Ceres is that it is the planetary equivalent of a wooly mammoth frozen in the ice. It may still contain some of this primordial ice. Studying it may give insight into the formation of our own planets and our neighbor planets.

Appreciation of Ceres grew again in the last quarter of the twentieth century because of this possibility. The asteroid belt is something like an astronomical archive, and two of its most ancient and valuable tomes are Ceres and Vesta. These two asteroids have remained intact since the dawn of the solar system 4.5 billion years ago, escaping severe damage by collisions with other protoplanets. NASA now has a mission called the DAWN spacecraft that will reach Ceres around 2015. See the NASA Fact Sheet.

DAWN uses a flashy technology called an ion drive that relies on charging ions of the element xenon and then firing them out of the back of the engine. This provides very little thrust, and on Earth such an engine would be ineffective against the friction of our atmosphere. But in space, the ion engine can slowly accelerate the satellite for months. DAWN has solar sails, ion thrusters fueled by 400 kilograms of xenon, a satellite dish, cameras, and a payload of scientific equipment, such as infrared and gamma-ray spectrometers, that will map the surface, search for water, and determine the chemical and mineral compositions of the asteroids. Scientists hope to understand some of the processes that were taking place in the earliest days of the solar system, such as the role of water.

Now back to Pluto. Even before DAWN was launched in 2007, the status of Ceres was under consideration when the International Astronomical Union (IAU) set up a committee that would decide on the criteria that defines a planet. Possible definitions rely on the size, orbit, and uniqueness of the orbit. Under these criteria, Ceres was not set to be reconsidered as a planet. The real deliberations were over whether or not Pluto should be given planet status.

Pluto had been declared a planet when it was discovered some seventy-five years ago, but at that time nobody had defined what a planet was. Size alone will not cut it. Judging by size, the Earth’s moon is bigger than Pluto. So are the two largest moons of Saturn and Jupiter. So is Neptune’s moon Triton. In its report, the IAU defined a planet as anything spherical, revolving the sun, and larger than 2,000 kilometers across. Under this definition Pluto would be a planet, but then so would a nearby object discovered in 2003. Some advocated on Pluto’s behalf. Others dismissed it outright. Some suggested waiting. But waiting was the last thing on the agenda, because the confusion had created something of a backlog of small objects that could not be named until astronomers knew what naming convention to use.

Unfortunately for Pluto, planets are not named by organizations like the IAU on the basis of popular culture or history. The stage was set for a showdown at the Twenty-sixth General Assembly of the International Astronomical Union in August 2006. The matter was simply referred to the entire IAU membership, and the IAU declared Pluto and Ceres dwarf planets.

What is next for Ceres? Right now nothing. Ashley Yeager from Science News reports that if objects similar to Ceres are detected, they will be named Ceroids.

For now, the last word belongs to the International Astronomical Union release says, “Current scientific knowledge lends credence to the belief that Ceres is the only object of its kind. Therefore, a separate category of Ceres-like dwarf planets will not be proposed at this time.”

Among the asteroids, Ceres is the only dwarf planet, which makes it the king of the asteroids. And among the dwarves, it is unique — a prince. There seems to be no other object like it in the solar system, and I look forward to 2015, when the Prince of Dwarves begins to yield secrets of itself and perhaps the earliest days of the solar system.

Further Reading:

– G. Waldo Dunnington, Gauss: Titan of Science (Washington, DC: Mathematical Association of America, 2004).

– C. T. Russell et al., “DAWN: A Journey to the Beginning of the Solar System,” www.ssc.igpp.ucla.edu/dawn/pdf/ACMConferencePaper, last visited May, 2007.

– Donald A. Teets and Karen Whitehead, “The Discovery of Ceres: How Gauss Became Famous,” Mathematics Magazine 72 (April 1999);

– W. K. Bühler, Gauss: A Biographical Study (Berlin: Springer-Verlag, 1981)

by Ram Manikkalingam

The US is a strange place. How you look really matters. Of course it matters everywhere else too. The clothes you wear, the way you wear them, your hairstyle or lack of it, your shoes and the bag you carry, all of these make a difference wherever you live. But, in the US, the colour of your skin, the shape of your nose and the way your hair curls, really really matters. Now the US is not the only place where lighter skin is considered better than darker (Indian magazines are full of skin whitening advertisements), or the wave of your hair or the shape of your nose is a focus of hairstylists and plastic surgeons. But in the US all this matters in a different way. It suggests not just social ideals of beauty or the social pressure to conform to particular aesthetic and stylistic sensisbilities associated with particular settings – it also indicates where you come from geographically and where your station might be in society and how society ought to treat you.

I observe this difference about the US, when I show photos of my family to my US friends, particularly the white ones. My brothers and sisters vary in shape, size and colour (and yes I am sure we have the same parents who are both Tamil from Sri Lanka). These friends invariably comment on how “racially” different members of my family appear. My brother could be southern European or middle eastern, some of my sisters central Asian, I could be African, another sister very South Asian etc. Those who are not from the US simply express how different we look. And those who are from the US use racial and ethnic categories to describe this difference.

In the American street (as Thomas Friedman would say) I am Black. And we know that in the US they treat you very differently if you are Black than if you are White. Brothers –- from the businessmen to the homeless — acknowledge me on the streets. When I ask for directions from a White person (not all) and I am wearing my sweatshirt, jeans and trainers –- they sometimes speak slowly and enunciate clearly how to go from one subway station to another -– just in case I do not understand. Don’t get me wrong –- nobody is rude to me. Nobody quite ignores me when I make a request. It is just that they treat me so differently on the streets of the US from how they treat me when I present a paper or give a lecture at a seminar, or in other professional settings that it is hard not to notice it. There they put me in a completely different category. They know my name and hear how I speak and suddenly I am not Black anymore. I become a South Asian academic.

Black, White or Foreign?

Barack isn’t Black enough – say some. And he is too Black say others. Or at least this is how his political dilemma is described. He needs to appeal to Whites without alienating Blacks. And his Blackness, particularly after the Jeremiah Wright episode, is viewed as a political challenge he needs to overcome in a racially divided America, because the Republicans will use a series of coded attacks, beginning with Jeremiah Wright’s sermon, as a more subtle and updated version of Willie Horton, to make Obama the Black candidate. And Obama’s strategy must be to avoid that label and become the candidate of both, if not all, racial groups. This anyway is how the racial tightrope that Obama needs to walk is usually described by pundits. Although he has run his race this way, I am not so sure it will continue to work as well for him in the future. Because the more successful he is at avoiding becoming either the Black or the White candidate, the more easily he can be made into the foreign candidate. After all, if you are American you’ve gotta be Black or White. So if you are neither Black nor White, you can’t be American.

Obama ran a successful post-racial campaign in a US that is not post-racial. He ran that for three reasons. The first is a pragmatic political one. As a Black candidate in what is still a White majority America, he cannot win as the Black candidate. The second is a moral one – ultimately for the US to have racial justice they also need to get beyond race –- both as a basis for discrimination and as a basis for redress — to a world where race matters less. And finally he was able to run a post-racial campaign for personal reasons -– his mother is White American and his father is a Black Kenyan . But Obama’s success at running a post-racial campaign in what is perceived as a racial US has made it easier for his opponents to portray him as foreign.

So this group of Americans (mainly White) are wary of him, not because he is too Black (or not Black enough), but because they link his not being quite Black or White to his foreignness – giving his antecedents a whiff of suspicion. In an extreme version, Obama to them becomes the Gay, Muslim candidate born in Africa, (it would be great if he were, except that he would not be able to legally run for President) ,not the post racial candidate of White-Black African-American ancestry. With this group being more Black may actually help, not hurt, Obama. Because whatever else White Americans have said about Blacks over the years –- even the most racist ones –- have never accused them of not being American. And I am optimistic enough to believe that an overwhelming majority of White Americans will vote for a Black candidate. His success as a candidate to date reflects this.

by Syed Tasnim Raza

Michael E. DeBakey died on July 11, 2008 of natural causes, just two months short of his 100th birthday. He was a pioneering, innovative, and world-renowned cardiovascular surgeon, whose surgical career spanned close to 70 years. While his name is most associated with Methodist Hospital of the Baylor College of Medicine in Houston, Texas, his career began at Tulane University in New Orleans in the late 1930s. It is at Tulane that he first described surgery for aortic aneurysms (ballooning of the aorta secondary to atherosclerosis) by cutting out the enlarged portion of the aorta and replacing it with a tube made out of Dacron. This operation has been performed millions of times throughout the world since then with great success.

Dr. DeBakey also described surgical treatment of another condition affecting the aorta, so-called aortic dissection, in which case the inner layer of the aorta (the intima) is torn, thus letting blood enter between the inner and outer layers, and as this condition progresses it shuts off the origins of major arteries coming off the aorta, causing stroke, heart attack, kidney failure and death if it remains untreated in a vast majority of patients. The classification of aortic dissection is named after DeBakey (DeBakey Types I, II and III). In December 2006, Dr. DeBakey himself suffered from Type I aortic dissection himself. He was 97 at the time and refused surgery due to his advanced age. But as the condition progressed he went into a coma and his wife and a long time associate, George Noon, asked for surgery to be performed against his expressed wish. The Ethics Committee of the hospital met, and in a controversial decision, permitted the operation to be performed, which was successful, although the recovery was complicated and he was hospitalized for over eight months, at a cost of over a million dollars. He fully recovered and remained active until his death.

Heart surgery was developed during the 1940’s, ‘50’s and ‘60’s in Boston, Philadelphia, Baltimore, and Minneapolis and Rochester in Minnesota. Dr. DeBakey, while working independently and outside of those major centers, made significant contributions in this field also. The heart lung machine was developed by the pioneering efforts of John Gibbon in Philadelphia and first used there in 1952, but it was the roller pump invented by DeBakey as a senior medical student in 1939, which made it much more useable and widely applicable after late 1950’s. Rene Favalaro, a Brazilian surgeon working at the Cleveland Clinic in Ohio, developed coronary artery bypass operation in 1967 using the saphenous veins from the legs to bypass obstructed coronary arteries in the heart. It turns out that Dr. DeBakey had successfully done this operation as a desperate measure in a patient who could not be weaned off the heart lung machine in 1964 in Houston, but did not report it at the time. It was eventually reported in 1974. Dr. DeBakey developed the first ventricular assist device (VAD), a mechanical pump which can support the heart for weeks or months, 300 of which have been implanted in humans, and newer versions of his device are still being used.

During the Second World War, Dr. DeBakey proposed that surgeons and nurses be deployed on the front lines with army units for providing immediate care to the injured, thus avoiding delays of evacuation to army hospitals. These became the M.A.S.H. units in the Korean war.

Another area in which Dr. DeBakey contributed greatly was making the Baylor College of Medicine and the Methodist Hospital in Houston one of the great medical education and research institutions in this country. At one time or the other he served there as the Chief Cardiovascular Surgeon, Chairman of Surgery, director of Cardiovascular Center, President of the hospital and Chancellor of the college. He took great pride as a teacher of surgery and trained hundreds of heart and vascular surgeons who are practicing throughout the world. He was known to be very demanding of the residents (though very charming to the patients and medical students), so much so that there are stories about his having slapped a resident on morning rounds, for having missed some minor point.

Another story which circulates among heart surgery residents is that a patient died just before morning rounds and no one wanted to break the news to Dr. DeBakey, so the patient was covered over by a sheet and Dr. DeBakey was told that there was no change in his condition, and they moved on. Another story about his dedication to surgery involves his first wife who died in 1972. Dr. DeBakey was operating when some one came in the room to give him the news. He asked not to be disturbed while he was operating and finished his day’s schedule at 7:00 PM, at which time he asked what was so urgent that could not wait for him to finish! Even if there is partial truth to these stories, they have circulated in the surgical circles for so long that most of us take them as true, since they do reflect his personality. By the time he retired in his late 80’s, DeBakey had performed over 60,000 operations! His former trainees have formed the highly prestigious Michael E. DeBakey Surgical Society.

Dr. DeBakey received numerous awards throughout his long career, including the Lasker Award, United Nations Lifetime Achievement Award, Presidential Medal of Freedom with Distinction, The National Medal of Science, Congressional Gold Medal and at least 38 other major awards form various professional medical associations and societies. I first met and heard Dr. DeBakey during my residency training in Buffalo where he came to receive the Roswell Park Gold Medal, an award given by the Buffalo Surgical Society annually to a distinguished surgeon. At that meeting Dr. DeBakey told us that he had interviewed for the position of Chairman of Surgery at the Buffalo General Hospital in 1963, but then decided to stay on in Houston! The last time I heard Dr. DeBakey was in 2000, when he was 92, still vigorous and active, and was given the American Association of Thoracic Surgery Lifetime Achievement Award.

The greatest protégée DeBakey produced was Denton Cooley, a surgeon originally trained under Alfred Blalock in Johns Hopkins Hospital, who then joined DeBakey in Houston. Within a few years Cooley broke from DeBakey and opened a competing heart center, the Texas Heart Institute, across the street form the Methodist Hospital. The two centers competed vigorously and both became internationally recognized centers of excellence.

Once when Dr. DeBakey was out of town, Dr. Cooley stole an early version of an experimental ventricular assist device from Methodist and implanted it in one of his patients. Dr. Cooley to this day says he did it as a desperate measure to save his patient’s life, Dr. DeBakey says he did it to be the first to implant a VAD! This became a national scandal and Dr. Cooley was censured by the American College of Surgeons. The two did not speak after that and feuded publicly at professional society meetings. Finally after 40 years of this widely reported feud last year the Denton Cooley Cardiovascular Surgical Society gave Dr. DeBakey a Lifetime Achievement Award, and with urgings from mutual friends, Dr. DeBakey agreed to attend the meeting. There he finally shook hands again with his long-time nemesis.

Michael Ellis DeBakey was born in New Orleans to Shaker and Raheeja Dabaghi (Anglicized to DeBakey), Maronite Christians from Lebanon, who immigrated to the United States because of religious persecution back home. He was one of five children and credits his parents for inculcating in him the values of education and hard work and service to others, which led him to his successful career. Dr. DeBakey is considered one of the greatest surgeons of the last century. His name will live on in many patient’s hearts, on many buildings and departments in Houston, with the work of hundreds of his trainees, and in his numerous publications and the devices that he developed, for many years to come.