William DeVries

William Castle DeVries (born December 19, 1943) is an American cardiothoracic surgeon, mainly known for the first transplant of a TAH (total artificial heart) using the Jarvik-7 model.

William DeVries was born December 19, 1943, in Brooklyn Navy Yard.

His father, Henry DeVries, was a Dutch immigrant who died in combat on the destroyer USS Kalk (DD-611) in 1944 during the Battle of Hollandia, where he had enrolled as a naval surgeon.

When his father died William was only six months old.

He 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.

After his mother remarried, the family was enlarged by eight more children and they all moved to Ogden, Utah, where he attended Ben Lomond High School and where he was an athlete being on the basketball and track teams.

During his childhood DeVries became an Eagle Scout.

Because the family was meeting financial difficulties, William had to work throughout his high school years to help out.

He also 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.

During college he was part of the Sigma Chi fraternity.

He graduated in 1966 with a bachelor's degree in molecular and Genetic biology.

In 1969 after some advice from doctor Keith Reemtsma, he decided to leave Salt Lake City and to start his residency in another hospital.

That is also the year in which doctor Denton Cooley attempted his first artificial heart transplant in a patient, in Houston.

Doctor Cooley's work would be an inspiration for doctor DeVries, who would later succeed in the transplant of the TAH.

After he left Utah, he attended a series of job interviews.

The first one was at the Massachusetts General Hospital in Boston.

The day of the interview, on his way to the hospital, he witnessed a person being stabbed by another man, and helped the victim until he was carried to the emergency room.

This episode was probably one of the reasons why he decided not to start his residency in Boston.

The second interview he attended was at the Johns Hopkins hospital, but eventually he opted for a residency at the Duke University in North Carolina.

At the end of his nine years surgical training, he headed back to Salt Lake City.

Later on he went to medical school also at the University of Utah and received his M.D. degree in 1970.

By the time he had finished with school, he had already built a family.

He married his first wife, Ane Karen, during the last year of college and had four children.

During college he was able to hold down three or four jobs and yet he graduated top of his class and received the award for the most outstanding graduate.

It was thanks to one of the jobs that he was involved in surgery.

He assisted doctor Willem Johan Kolff during his work and during night he was paid to watch over the animals in the lab.

In 1979 Doctor 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.

At that time the university was known for being one of the country's few pioneering centers for advanced surgery on vital organs and their transplanting and implanting into animals and humans.

In Salt Lake City he worked with doctor Robert Jarvik and doctor Kolff.

By the time DeVries was back to Salt Lake City, the calves with artificial heart were able to live up to six, seven, even eight months.

These results inspired him to take on with the work and so he started a series of long-term animal experiments.

After two years of experiments, doctor DeVries and his colleagues tried to obtain the U.S. Food and Drug Administration (FDA) and the National Institutes of Health (NIH) approval.

At the beginning, nobody really paid much consideration to the work, but after a while it started to acquire new attention, things changed, and even the NIH started to be interested in the project.

Therefore, DeVries started to look for a suitable patient for the first attempt.

In 1982, the FDA gave the approval to experiment the device on a human, and so a panel of six members at the University of Utah Medical Center started searching for a patient.

The group was composed of two cardiologists, a psychiatrist, a nurse, a social worker and DeVries; the decision had to be unanimous.

The first patient was a Seattle dental surgeon named Barney Clark, affected with an end-stage congestive heart failure.

The seven-hour surgery was carried out on December 2, 1982, and it was successful.

Doctor William DeVries, 38 years old at that time, was known to listen occasionally to rock music while performing surgery.

In his first Jarvik-7 implant the operating room was hushed, except for the voice communications to the medical team and the quietly played strains of Joseph-Maurice Ravel's "Boléro".