William Castle DeVries was born on December 19,1943 and is an American cardiothoracic surgeon, mainly known for the first transplant of a TAH using the Jarvik-7 model.
22 Facts About William DeVries
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William DeVries was born December 19,1943, in Brooklyn Navy Yard.
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When his father died William was only six months old.
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William DeVries was raised by his grandmother and his mother who was a member of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints until he was five.
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William DeVries won the Utah state finals in high jumping and thanks to his sport abilities he went to the University of Utah on a track scholarship.
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William DeVries graduated in 1966 with a bachelor's degree in molecular and Genetic biology.
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William DeVries married his first wife, Ane Karen, during the last year of college and had four children.
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William DeVries assisted doctor Willem Johan Kolff during his work and during night he was paid to watch over the animals in the lab.
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In 1979 Doctor William DeVries went back to the University of Utah to become the chairman of thoracic and cardiovascular surgery; there, he used to perform two to five open-heart operations a week.
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Therefore, William DeVries started to look for a suitable patient for the first attempt.
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The patient lived, but William DeVries found much harder to manage the device on a patient rather than on a healthy animal.
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William DeVries refused to shut down the device, this caught the attention of the media, and made William DeVries achieve the cover of Time magazine.
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William DeVries was constantly obsessed with critics and legal issues concerning about what he was doing whether it was right or wrong.
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Consequently, William DeVries found himself on a quest for fund raising, which, at the beginning did not succeed until Wendell Cherry, vice chairman of the Humana Inc offered him to relocate in Louisville, Kentucky; in exchange Cherry offered to finance the next 100 implants.
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William DeVries lived for 620 days after the operation, during which he was able to leave the hospital and do a series of normal activities like traveling, attending a basketball game and even fishing.
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In 1983, William DeVries received the Golden Plate Award of the American Academy of Achievement.
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In January 1988 William DeVries was close to performing his fifth implantation, when a human donor heart was found for the patient.
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Collections of William DeVries papers are held at the National Library of Medicine in Bethesda, Maryland.
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William DeVries's life was extended somewhat, but he spent it in bed.
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William DeVries felt that all this attention was slowing his work in Utah, and so decided to leave Salt Lake City for a position in Louisville.
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Thanks to the Humana Inc funds, William DeVries implanted another artificial heart at the Humana Human Heart Institute International in a patient called Bill Schroeder.
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William DeVries felt that the best way to concede the dilemma was to have people understand that the TAH was not a permanent solution but just a temporary substitution for a diseased heart.