In 1988, when he was 47, Cheney underwent quadruple bypass surgery — a technique, refined by René Favaloro in the 1960s, that grafts vessels to reroute blood flow to the heart.
The science that extended Dick Cheney’s life was a choice
November 7, 2025 - Charles "Chaz" Hong, MD, PhD
The below OpEd piece was originally published on November 6, 2025 in the Washington Post.
Former vice president Dick Cheney’s death stunned me this week — because of how extraordinarily long he lived in defiance of a failing heart. His decades-long journey through cardiovascular catastrophe mirrors the triumphant arc of modern medicine, which has turned what was once a death sentence into a chronicle of survival built on relentless scientific progress.
Cheney’s first heart attack struck in 1978, when he was 37 and campaigning for Congress. The prior year marked the debut of coronary angioplasty — a balloon-tipped catheter to clear blockages. The procedure, pioneered by Andreas Grüntzig, was considered experimental and so was unavailable to Cheney at the time.
A second attack, in 1984, came three years before the Food and Drug Administration approved the first statin drug: lovastatin. It was inspired by Akira Endo’s discovery of compactin in fungi — a breakthrough that has since prevented tens of millions of heart attacks worldwide by lowering cholesterol.
After the 2000 election, Cheney suffered a fourth heart attack at 59. That event led to coronary stenting, which builds on Grüntzig’s angioplasty work by keeping arteries open with metal scaffolds. In 2001, the threat of a fatal arrhythmia led to the placement of an implantable cardioverter-defibrillator, invented by Michel Mirowski in the 1970s to shock the heart back to rhythm.
A fifth attack, at 69 in 2010, escalated to end-stage heart failure. Though Cheney benefited from breakthrough heart failure medications like beta blockers, angiotensin-converting enzyme inhibitors and aldosterone antagonists, newer heart failure therapies were still years away.
Cheney’s terminally failing heart required a left ventricular assist device — a mechanical pump pioneered by Michael DeBakey, refined at Stanford University and elsewhere. This turbine, implanted with a driveline exiting the abdomen, bought Cheney time until March 2012. That year, at 71, he received a donor heart, enabled by cyclosporine, an immunosuppressant drug — discovered in Norwegian soil in 1972 and revolutionized by Jean Borel — that helps prevent the rejection of new organs. Cheney’s transplant built on Christiaan Barnard’s 1967 landmark operation and Norman Shumway’s refinements of it.
A man who suffered his first of many heart attacks at 37 gained five more extraordinarily productive decades. This was nothing short of miraculous, but it wasn’t lucky — it is a testament to human ingenuity, achieved through an iterative series of unglamorous medical scientific breakthroughs.
Future “miracles” abound: Gene therapies and gene modification technologies, like CRISPR — pioneered by Jennifer Doudna and Emmanuelle Charpentier — are replacing faulty heart genes in trials, potentially curing inherited cardiomyopathies and premature coronary artery disease, which Cheney had. Xenotransplantation with genetically modified pig organs promises unlimited donors, potentially ending waitlists that leave tens of thousands to die yearly.
Much of these triumphs trace to the support of the National Institutes of Health, yet it faces existential threats. In 2025, the Trump administration proposed drastic cuts to indirect cost rates that could gut research infrastructure, as well as the freezing of grants, which could halt cancer and Alzheimer’s studies among many others. In response, universities paused hiring, closed labs and laid off staff. Perhaps worst of all, many universities and hospitals halted research training programs, eroding the pipeline of future innovators. Though courts blocked some cuts, uncertainty has spurred a brain drain of researchers to other countries and disciplines.
Tools exist to prevent first heart attacks: risk screening and cheap drugs to control cholesterol and blood pressure. For cardiovascular medicine, this is just the beginning. NIH-funded research has yielded targeted therapies, including GLP-1 agonists, originally for diabetes, which slash heart attacks and strokes by up to 20 percent while aiding weight loss, redefining obesity as a modifiable cardiac risk. Twice-yearly injections to lower cholesterol are now approved. Advanced biomarkers and polygenic risk scores that estimate genetic predisposition to disease will enable precision prevention — potentially catching and preventing heart disease like Cheney’s.
Biomedical science gave Cheney decades of life once unimaginable. To keep America great, every American deserves the same chance. We should protect the biomedical research engine that saved him and build a health care system that extends those extra years to all.
Chaz Hong, MD, PhD, FAHA, FACP
Chair of Medicine College of Human Medicine
Michigan State University