Jack Copeland (surgeon)

[2] He entered Stanford University as a biology major in 1960, and subsequently earned a medical degree there nine years later.

At Stanford, he became chief resident of cardiac surgery[1] and in 1977 reported the first successful repeat-heart transplant in a human.

[9] By 1985, at the age 43, when he was head of the Cardiovascular and Thoracic Surgery Section at the University of Arizona College of Medicine in Tucson, his team had performed over sixty such transplants.

[12] The previous TAH implants were temporary by Cooley (1969 and 1981) and Copeland (1985) had failed to result in survival for more than days and several were "permanent" TAH implants by William DeVries (Barney Clark in December 1982) that resulted in short term survival.

[13] Prior to the first success, in March 1985, Copeland and his team had emergently implanted the unapproved Phoenix total artificial heart in a critically ill young man.

[citation needed] In 2010, he and his team also reported their results of using LVADs in infants and children with severe heart failure from dilated cardiomyopathy.

[7] Here, he joined the faculty at the new Sulpizio Family Cardiovascular Center at the University of California, San Diego.

[22] On 7 January 2011, during a four-hour operation, Copeland was part of the team that implanted, as a bridge-to-transplant, the world's only FDA-approved total artificial heart (TAH) for temporary use.

The alternative option, which would have required two operations, was to offer a Left ventricular assist device (LVAD) as a bridge-to-transplantation.

[25] In acknowledgment of his achievements with artificial hearts and heart-assist devices, he received the 2001 Barney Clark Award.