The National Heart and Blood Vessel Research and Demonstration Center was established January 1, 1975, at Baylor College of Medicine, by the National Heart and Lung Institute, National Institutes of Health. The Center existed from 1975 through 1982, and research conducted at the Center resulted in nearly 800 publications.

Dr. Denton A. Cooley, the founder of the Texas Heart Institute, attended the University of Texas and the Johns Hopkins University School of Medicine, where he graduated in 1944. After serving in the Army Medical Corps and studying with Lord Russell Brock in London, he returned to his hometown of Houston, Texas to teach surgery at Baylor College of Medicine in the 1950s. The Texas Heart Institute was founded on August 3, 1962 in order to research and treat cardiovascular disease, the leading cause of death in the United States. Among many innovations developed by Cooley and his colleagues at the Institute are the first implantation of an artificial heart, the first successful heart transplant in the United States, advances in treatment of congenital defects, and a number of prostheses and implants. The Institute is part of Texas Medical Center, the largest medical center in the word. CHI St. Luke’s Health – Baylor St. Luke’s Medical Center is the Institute’s clinical partner. [Sources: Texas Heart Institute website; The Houston Review, vol. 2, no. 1, p.16-19]

Sidney A. Schnur (June 23, 1910 – April 8, 1997) was born in Manhattan, New York and earned his MD from New York University in 1935. He was a physician and a clinical assistant professor at Baylor College of Medicine, and he served as president of the Harris County Medical Society in 1972.

One of Schnur’s patients at St. Joseph’s Hospital, near death from cardiogenic shock (when the heart cannot pump enough blood to meet the body’s needs) after a heart attack, was the test for Denton Cooley’s heart-lung machine in April 1956; the patient lived another six weeks before succumbing to a second heart attack.