Dr. DeBakey’s inventive mind and capacity for thinking outside the box would rock the world once again during his time as a Tulane student. Working in the surgical laboratory, he was challenged with finding an effective way to simulate a pulse wave for experiments. He went to the engineering stacks of the library and got to work designing a new roller pump. DeBakey’s roller pump proved to be the final piece in the puzzle of a successful heart-lung machine, allowing open-heart surgery for the first time.

Michael DeBakey would go on to change the face of modern cardiovascular surgery and maybe history, too—after all, he counted among his patients Richard Nixon, Lyndon B. Johnson, John F. Kennedy and Jordan’s King Hussein.

And that pump keeps rolling on. DeBakey’s invention remains the most frequently used blood pump for cardiopulmonary bypass in the world.