Denton Cooley 1960s. He and his colleagues worked on developing new artificial heart valves from 1962 to 1967; during that period, mortality for heart valve transplants fell from 70% to 8%. In 1969, he became the first heart surgeon to implant an artificial heart designed by Domingo Liotta in a man, Haskell Karp, who lived for 65 hours. The next year, in 1970, "he performed the first implantation of an artificial heart in a human when no heart replacement was immediately available." Cooley's interests included basketball, which he played in high school and as a three-year letterman for the UT men's basketball
Ray Liotta In 1998, he received critical praise for his performance in "Phoenix" playing a compulsive gambler. In addition to his film roles, Liotta portrayed singer Frank Sinatra in the 1998 TV movie "The Rat Pack" (for which he received a Screen Actors Guild award nomination), provided the voice of Tommy Vercetti for the 2002 video game "Grand Theft Auto: Vice City", and appeared in the television drama "ER" in 2004, playing Charlie Metcalf in the episode "Time of Death". The "ER" role earned Liotta an Emmy for Outstanding Guest Actor in a Drama Series (Liotta later spoofed himself and his Emmy