May, 1967.

Inside an operating room at the Cleveland Clinic, under sterile light and the quiet hum of machines, an Argentine surgeon was about to make history.
René Favaloro prepared to perform the world’s first successful aortocoronary bypass.

What seemed like a technical fix between two arteries became something larger — a bridge between science and ethics.
That single gesture of precision changed the future of cardiovascular medicine and, at the same time, revealed a philosophy: knowledge must serve people, not power.

But his revolution hadn’t begun in that hospital.
It started decades earlier, in a small house in La Plata, Argentina — where a child learned that work, patience, and observation could also be forms of thought.

René grew up among sawdust and sewing threads — his father a carpenter, his mother a dressmaker.
His grandmother Cesárea taught him something no textbook could: sensitivity.
She showed him how to care for the garden, to read the rhythm of seasons, to understand that every life form is connected.
That intimate education shaped his worldview: medicine wasn’t a battlefield against disease, but a conversation with nature.

At the National University of La Plata, he was brilliant — and stubborn.
In 1949, newly graduated, he refused to sign the political oath required by President Perón’s government to hold a hospital position.
It was a quiet act of rebellion, but it defined him.
For Favaloro, loyalty to conscience came before loyalty to any party.
The patient — not the ideology — had to come first.

His self-exile took him to Jacinto Arauz, a rural town of 3,500 souls lost in the pampas.
He arrived to cover for a sick physician and stayed twelve years.
There he built a small clinic, trained locals in hygiene, and insisted that health was not a privilege but a right.
He delivered babies by kerosene light, performed surgery with improvised tools, and escorted critical patients by train.
The scarcity didn’t crush him — it refined him.
He learned that medicine, at its core, is an ethical act.

In 1962 he left for the United States to specialize in thoracic surgery.
He arrived with little English and no connections, ironing shirts to make rent and watching operations in silence.
That patience turned into insight.

Five years later, on May 9 1967, he performed the first bypass surgery — a vein from the leg rerouted blood around a blocked artery, giving the heart a second chance. A literal bridge toward life.

The medical world celebrated. Favaloro, meanwhile, longed for Argentina — for its noise, its people, its unfinished stories. The precision of Cleveland could not replace the purpose he felt in the pampas. So he decided to go back, knowing that returning would be its own kind of experiment.

In 1971, he came home to a fractured country — dictatorship, censorship, fear. He founded the Favaloro Foundation, a nonprofit meant to blend research, teaching, and patient care. He wanted world-class medicine accessible to everyone, regardless of income.

Inside the institute, he drafted what he called The Work Creed:

“Avoid dogma. Never abandon ethics. And remember — the ‘I’ has been replaced by ‘we.’ ”

That “we” was his politics in plain language.
He belonged to no party, but his integrity was inherently political — and often uncomfortable for those in power.

Favaloro’s life was a long act of resistance. He rejected party obedience under Peronism, later joined the CONADEP truth commission after the dictatorship, and resigned when he realized that certain crimes — like those of the paramilitary Triple A — would remain untouched.
His principle was constant: truth has no owner.

During the 1990s, when Argentina was hypnotized by privatization and TV spectacle, Favaloro went on prime-time shows to talk about sacrifice, taxes, and honesty.

“Without work, without effort, without sacrifice, this country won’t move forward — not just the poor, all of us,” he said.

He criticized the elites who evaded taxes while lecturing about patriotism.
He refused to hide behind celebrity, admitting on air that his coat was second-hand, his shoes resoled, his savings left abroad to fund his foundation.

He also broke taboos. He supported the legalization of abortion as a public-health necessity, not an endorsement of the act:

“The rich go to private clinics. The poor die in silence.”
It was a position both moral and pragmatic — and it placed him outside every comfortable camp."

By the late 1990s, the foundation that bore his name was drowning in debt.
Argentina’s economic model was collapsing; donations dried up.
Favaloro went from global icon to desperate fundraiser.
He wrote letters — even one to President Fernando de la Rúa — pleading for six million pesos to keep the hospital alive:

“I have no ties to big business. I write to you from despair.”

The plea arrived too late. On July 29, 2000, alone and exhausted, Favaloro locked himself in his bathroom and shot himself in the heart — the very organ he had spent his life repairing.

His death stunned Argentina.
It wasn’t just the loss of a doctor; it was the collapse of a moral landmark.
But his presence endures — in surgical textbooks, yes, but more importantly in the ethical imagination of anyone who still believes that science must answer to conscience.

The bypass saved millions, yet his greater invention was moral: proving that progress without ethics is just technology with amnesia.
He taught that no institution, public or private, makes sense without integrity — that the heart can be repaired with skill, but only compassion keeps it beating.

René Favaloro was, above all, an ethical rebel.
A man who refused to let intelligence divorce itself from empathy.
And that — more than the surgery that bears his name — remains the bypass humanity still needs.

"Se marchó, por la puerta de atrás. Decidió evitar la corrupción. Decidió y ahí no más se suicidó. Y pensar que fue maestro del by pass, y murió, de un disparo al corazón"