Cooley 2nd to Perform Heart Surgery on Internet

Famed Texas heart surgeon Denton Cooley, who performed the first successful human heart transplant in the United States, had to settle for second place Wednesday when he performed open-heart surgery live on the Internet.

The pioneering 77-year-old surgeon, who also implanted the first artificial heart in a human, was upstaged by doctors in Seattle who did a live open-heart surgery broadcast Tuesday.

In what had been billed in advance as a first, Cooley carried out a quadruple coronary artery bypass operation on a 48-year-old woman that was shown live on the World Wide Web and on the cable television channel America’s Health Network.

Cooley responded with good grace to news that Dr. Robert Lazzara of the Providence Seattle Medical Center had beaten him to the punch a day earlier with a live Internet broadcast of bypass surgery on Seattle residents Gloria Snoddy, 57, and Charles Sheridan, 52.

The Houston operation went ahead as scheduled Wednesday with Rena Fluker, a mother of three from nearby Pasadena, Texas, undergoing a three-hour operation to circumvent the obstructed arteries of her heart with veins taken from her leg.

The network’s Dr. Walt Larimore provided a running commentary, interspersed with explanatory comments from Cooley.

The patient’s husband of 32 years, Robert Fluker, said he had not been able to watch the proceedings himself.

“It was my wife, so I just prayed and waited to see what was going to happen, and I’m just thankful that things have worked out so well so far,” he said.