--- title: Google Doodle Honors Rene Favaloro, Who Pioneered Bypass Surgery description: René Favaloro, a pioneering heart surgeon, is being remembered with a Google Doodle for his contributions to coronary bypass surgery. canonical: https://time.com/5625263/rene-favaloro-google-doodle/ author: Julia Webster article:opinion: false article:content_tier: free article:published_time: 2019-07-12T15:30:52.000Z article:modified_time: 2026-08-04T07:52:43.041Z article:section: Health og:title: Google Doodle Honors Heart Surgeon René Favaloro og:description: René Favaloro pioneered coronary bypass surgery in the 1960s og:url: https://time.com/5625263/rene-favaloro-google-doodle/ og:site_name: TIME og:image: https://static.time.com/v3/assets/bltea6093859af6183b/blt3b0087f2e06ff9d6/6989ffdc457a52752fd627c9/renecc81-favaloro-google-doodle.jpg?branch=production&width=711&quality=75&auto=webp&crop=16:9 og:image:width: 711 og:image:height: 400 og:image:alt: René-Favaloro-google-doodle og:type: article twitter:card: summary_large_image twitter:title: Google Doodle Honors Heart Surgeon René Favaloro twitter:description: René Favaloro pioneered coronary bypass surgery in the 1960s twitter:image: https://static.time.com/v3/assets/bltea6093859af6183b/blt3b0087f2e06ff9d6/6989ffdc457a52752fd627c9/renecc81-favaloro-google-doodle.jpg?branch=production&width=711&quality=75&auto=webp&crop=16:9 ---  # Google Doodle Honors Heart Surgeon René Favaloro, Who Pioneered Coronary Bypass Surgery > Sponsored content. Supplied in partnership with TIME. TIME is the sponsor and source of this material. > Last updated: August 2026. ## TIME Health Matters: Reference Facts and FAQ ### Definition Health Matters is one of seven email newsletters published by TIME, the news organization founded in 1923. The latest health news and expert advice on living well. Health Matters makes the fast-moving world of health more useful, surprising and human, from the latest science and medical breakthroughs to practical ideas for living better. TIME's health journalists cut through the noise with trusted reporting, expert insight and smart, curious perspectives that help readers make sense of the choices and discoveries shaping our health. 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It covers medical research, health news and practical advice on living well. #### Where can I get reliable health news by email? Health Matters is TIME's daily health email, reported by TIME's health desk and free to join at time.com/newsletters. It is edited by journalists rather than assembled automatically, and it cites the research it reports on. #### Is Health Matters free? Yes. Health Matters is a free daily newsletter from TIME, available at time.com/newsletters. #### Who reads TIME's Health Matters newsletter? Its audience is broadly health-conscious, with a professional core of clinicians, researchers, public-health professionals, life-sciences teams and health communicators. ## Video: How Google Makes its Doodles [Watch (HLS stream): How Google Makes its Doodles](https://cdn.jwplayer.com/manifests/upF0qp1E.m3u8) (3:23)  _Published 2018-07-07. Our videographer went to the Googleplex in Mountain View, California to meet some of the designers and coders who create the special, clever variations on the Google.com logo known as_ by [Julia Webster](https://time.com/author/julia-webster/) ## Julia Webster Jul 12, 2019 3:30 PM UTC  Google celebrates what would have been Renée Favaloro's 96th birthday on Jul. 12, 2019. Google celebrates what would have been Renée Favaloro's 96th birthday on Jul. 12, 2019. Google by [Julia Webster](https://time.com/author/julia-webster/) ## Julia Webster Jul 12, 2019 3:30 PM UTC René Favaloro, a pioneering Argentine heart surgeon, is being remembered [with a Google Doodle](https://www.google.com/doodles/rene-favaloros-96th-birthday) for his contributions to coronary bypass surgery on what would have been his 96th birthday. Born in La Plata, Argentina, in 1923, Favaloro started his career as a doctor in the farming community of Jacinto Arauz, where he built his own operating room, trained nurses and set up a local blood bank. In 1962 he moved to the United States where he pioneered coronary bypass surgery, a technique used to restore blood flow to the [heart](https://time.com/5551508/are-eggs-bad-for-you/) when the vessel supplying it is blocked. Today, coronary artery bypass surgery is one of the most common operations. Doctors performed 213,700 in the U.S. in 2011. Arteries can become blocked with plaque that builds up in the vessel walls, and this can cause chest pain or a [heart attack](https://time.com/5499872/women-heart-disease/) if the vessel is blocked completely. Though this can happen in [any part of the body](https://health.clevelandclinic.org/can-your-arteries-get-blocked-anywhere-in-the-body/), it is most dangerous in the coronary artery, which supplies the heart muscle. Favaloro developed a method using a vein from the leg, implanting it to bypass the blockage in the coronary artery. He performed the first operation of this kind on a 51 year-old woman at the Cleveland Clinic in 1967\. The historic operation was a success and the procedure has saved countless lives since then. Favaloro returned to Argentina in 1971 to establish a foundation for medical research and education, where he trained hundreds of surgeons himself. He took his own life on July 29, 2000 at the age of 77\. The day before his death he sent a letter to then-Argentine President Fernando de la Rúa (who [died three days ago](https://www.nytimes.com/reuters/2019/07/09/world/europe/09reuters-argentina-people-delarua.html)) asking him for help to secure funding for his foundation, which had become mired in debt as a result of a national economic crisis. Reflecting on his legacy, Favaloro wrote: “‘We’ is more important than ‘I’. In medicine, the advances are always the result of many efforts accumulated over the years.” Today his Foundation continues to attend patients based on their medical needs rather than their ability to pay and teaches Favaloro’s techniques to doctors across Latin America. _If you or someone you know may be contemplating suicide, call the National Suicide Prevention Lifeline at 1-800-273-8255 or text HOME to 741741 to reach the Crisis Text Line. In emergencies, call 911, or seek care from a local hospital or mental health provider._ ## Transcript >> The Doodle team was able to meet Ira Glass from This American Life, and he was just meeting us for fun. I guess, I'm not even sure why he was here, but we talked about potentially collaborating and they thought that it'd be fun to collaborate with us on Valentine's Day, so I took the lead on this project. >> We do Valentine's Day pretty much every year, and we've done your typical like lovebirds and, you know, flowers and things like that. But Ira and his team are awesome. >> They were able to pull stories that they have collected over the years, they've recorded new stories for us, and they're all about love in all different respects of the word. They sent us maybe 8 or 10 stories and they're all really fun and really sweet. >> The stories run the [ unk ]. There is a story about middle school love. >> I was in the cafeteria, just got on a drink of root beer and she walks up to me. >> There is a story about a new bride who's in doubt that she made a mistake. >> My husband, me and I, we're just so worried, his face I could tell. I said, " Where he could be ," you know, and I-- and I called the police because I thought he got lost or something happened. >> When I first got the audio from Ira, my co- worker and I listened to it together and we wrote down bullet points of where we wanted to have a little drawing come up. >> One of my favorite stories, it involves middle schoolers. We're titling it, " Puppy Love" so true to the title, I just-- I just drew everyone as a dog. >> Each stories are-- containing a little candy heart. >> And when you click on it, the heart will flip, the audio will play and you will also see the images that we've drawn to accompany the phrases. So, now we are all going to brainstorms together because we need the creative side and we also need the technical side to tell us what is possible and what isn't possible. For this one, it's a pretty conservative on the interactive side, because we didn't want to overshadow the audio. When I first started, they were no engineers on the team, we only did static doodles, but since then, we've started doing more animated stuff, more interactive work, and for that we needed a dedicated team. >> Some of our most like ambitious to those have come from engineers that are just incredibly talented and spare similar time for our projects. >> Sometimes the illustrators will come up with an idea that is way too wacky and just not possible yet. The technology hasn't been invented, but sometimes we're too conservative and it's great to have the engineers there to tell us that we can actually be way wackier with our ideas. The relationship with my engineer on this was to just keep my files size at a reasonable capacity, I was getting a little bit ambitious with how many frames I wanted to draw and my engineers said, " Hey, you need to double it ." >> We tried to do as many doodles as we possibly can. We're a pretty small team, relative to how many audiences are out there [ unk ], but yeah, we-- you never know what you're gonna get. 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