(crickets chirping) Very few people get to see the fruition of their dreams.

He found a horrible problem, he was passionate about trying to find a solution.

I just threw it out there to the universe.

It just hit him like a bolt out of the blue.

I wish that would happen to me with wording of a story.

RONALD: The quail were decimated by the diseases.

MIMI: It's like a holy grail of medicine.

This changed the restaurant industry forever.

NARRATOR: Major funding for this program was provided by, NARRATOR 1: At H-E-B, we're proud to offer over 6,000 products grown, harvested, or made by our fellow Texans.

♪ I saw aisles and miles ♪ NARRATOR 1: It's all part of our commitment to preserving the future of Texas, and supporting our Texas neighbors.

(gentle music) NARRATOR 2: Texas Parks and Wildlife Foundation is dedicated to conserving the wild things and wild places in Texas.

Learn more at tpwf.org.

(dramatic music) (keyboard clacking) WES: When you find a dead bird, and suddenly it has these nasty worms crawling around in its eyeballs, and then also finding birds where their eyes are just empty sockets.

The evidence is smacking you right in the face.

My name is Wes Ferguson.

I wrote, "Can the Bobwhite Quail Be Saved?"

for Texas Monthly.

(dramatic music) RONALD: He's pointed right here.

(tense music) (bird chirping) So this came in as a press release.

And the funny thing is, if any journalist knows, you just get inundated with press releases every day.

And most of the time you just hit delete, delete, delete.

This one really caught my attention, because it was something I'd never heard about.

Here's this miracle cure for worms in Bobwhite quails.

The Bobwhite quail is really a gorgeous bird.

It has kind of a dumpy pear-shaped body, which is kind of funny, but it has all these different colors on its feathers, and these really beautiful black and white stripes on their face.

And I'm sure that people in North America have been eating them since humans were here on this continent.

But I think over time, they became more of like a gentleman's hunting bird, because they are kind of hard to shoot, 'cause they're so fast, they just bust out of the brush, and you've gotta be a really good shot.

It still is one of our premier game birds that are hunted.

But since the 1960s, I think the population across America has declined by 85%.

And Texas is no different.

Their last strongholds in Texas are the rolling plains north of Abilene, east of Lubbock, as one of their last bastions.

All right, we're out here W Seven Ranch in Garza County, Texas.

And this is some very good-looking quail habitat and I've been talking to the quail.

It sounds like this.

(Ronald whistling) The groups of quail we call a covey, might be 15, 20 birds in a group.

We're gonna put the bird dogs down and what they're gonna do is locate these coveys' forest.

This is where the wild quail lived.

(gunshot exploding) WES: So Dr.

Kendall is a professor at Texas Tech, but he grew up in South Carolina, which had lots of Bobwhite quail hunting traditions, and so he was excited to move out to Lubbock, and work at Texas Tech, because he knew he was gonna be able to hunt these birds from his homeland.

Come on, come on.

WES: Dr.

Kendall's kind of a trip.

He's very enthusiastic, he's very passionate.

I got him!

The Bobwhite quail.

There's no finer game bird.

In 2010, they were really optimistic that it was gonna be a great hunt, because they'd had lots of good rain, the fields were green, everything was looking perfect for Bobwhite, and then they get out there, and the birds are gone.

Even if you don't hunt Bobwhite quail, you should be rooting for them to survive because that indicates that you have a healthy ecosystem for all the other animals and plants and birds and bugs that all come together to make sure that those ecosystems are thriving and healthy.

If you can't protect this bird here in their last bastion, then we're gonna lose them forever.

Habitat loss and ranch fragmentation is no doubt, probably the biggest problem facing quail, but not so much in the rolling plains.

And Dr.

Kendall knew there had to be something else affecting these birds on his ranch.

Then he finds these birds.

(mysterious music) And you see these worms are visible to the human eye.

Dr.

Kendall is a professor of environmental toxicology, so he's really the perfect guy at the perfect time to make this discovery.

Here in the lab, we've spent the last approximately 12 years studying the disease in our wild quail, our wild Bobwhite quail.

What we're looking at here is some eye tissue from infected wild quail.

And you can see the eye worms moving around some of the eye tissue.

They don't exist just on the eyeball itself, they're penetrating tissue in the eye, feeding and reproducing.

And it can cause blindness, it can cause damage to the eye.

That's what's in our quail.

So Dr.

Kendall could see with his own eyes that this was a huge problem on his ranch, and his neighbor ranches, but they had to back that up with actual research.

So they went out and did rigorous studies.

They trapped birds, and looked at them, and they found that nearly every bird was infested with these worms.

(mysterious music) I talked to Joe Crafton with the Park Cities Quail Coalition.

We raise several million dollars a year that goes right back into research and education to support quail hunting.

One of the interesting points that he brought up was how hunters are deeply invested in conservation.

People don't really understand the counterintuitive argument.

We love animals, but we hunt animals.

But the fact is, without that, land use would change dramatically, and all wildlife would suffer.

It's essentially the canary of the prairie, all right?

It's a signal bird.

It's telling us something about the health of our ecosystem.

We want to sustain and preserve wild quail hunting tradition in Texas.

(mysterious music) We have a lot of worming medication for livestock and for dogs.

And so he thought, if it works for all these other animals, why would it not work for the Bobwhite quail?

They came up with the name Quail Guard.

It's kind of like chicken scratch, the stuff that you would feed to your chickens, with a little bit of that medicine mixed in.

Dr.

Kendall's son, Ronnie, he really focused on creating these shed-like, metal structures, that would allow the Bobwhite quail to go in and eat the feed while preventing any other animal from getting access to it.

So this is the Quail Safe.

The feed just goes in the hopper here.

There's some Quail Guard in there.

This is the perfect height for an adult quail to feed off this feed plate.

There's ground entry holes on all four sides.

On the top here is the electronic cubby collar.

(bird squawking) They theorized that this medicine would work, but then they had to prove it.

The next step was to go out in the field.

They partnered with some ranchers out in the rolling plains and were putting out the medicine there, and were also able to document that this medicine is making a difference in these areas.

I've been here all my life.

The quail were decimated by the diseases.

10 years ago was the last good hunt I've had.

This year, it's phenomenal.

I haven't seen bird counts like this since I was nine years old.

It finally got FDA approval in May 2024.

If you have a ranch, if you're worried about your quail, I mean this is now a tool that is available to you and everyone else just like you.

He could end up being like one of the most important figures in saving the Bobwhite quail.

This is what a lot of us live for, quail hunt in Texas.

And this is a part of our natural resources, and such a valuable part of the land.

(gentle music) (heartbeat thumping) Very few people get to see the fruition of their dreams.

(heartbeat thumping) The artificial heart is like a cure for cancer.

It's like a holy grail of medicine.

They're people who have spent their lives trying to build an artificial heart.

And this may be the moment where the problem's solved.

My name is Mimi Swartz, I'm a writer for Texas Monthly, and I wrote about "The Quest to Create an Artificial Heart."

The history of heart disease runs through Houston.

(classical music) One of the most famous things about Houston is that the world's largest medical center is here.

The Texas Medical Center has no equal in terms of size.

And within the world's largest medical center, the best heart surgeons in the world.

Okay, over here is the Texas Heart Institute.

I think I've been in this building 10 million times.

In the history of these artificial hearts, it's a story of medical experimentation.

(classical music) In the early years, people were chained to machines that were the size of refrigerators, which couldn't sustain life for more than a short period of time.

It's not a permanent solution.

Over and over a period of decades, the best doctors on the planet failed in one way or another.

(sirens wailing) (gentle music) I had been living in Houston a long time, and I knew about these two famous surgeons, Dr.

Denton Cooley and Dr.

Michael DeBakey.

Both of these men had a dream to create an artificial heart.

Their protege was Bud Frazier, who picked up the gauntlet and ran with it.

I was a History English major.

I found science dull, boring.

But my hamstring muscles avulsed in spring training at the University of Texas in 1960, so I decided to go medical school.

Dr.

Frazier is one of the premier transplant surgeons in the country.

Because of that, he understood the need for an artificial heart.

I started doing heart transplants in '82.

And I did more heart transplants than anybody in the world by '87.

But by the early 90s, it was obvious heart transplant patients were lucky to live 20 years.

And that hadn't changed.

(gentle music) The number of people with heart failure has continued to rise.

And so the idea was that an artificial heart would solve the problem.

I thought, "Why is it so hard to replace the heart?"

Which is sort of idiotic that I thought that, but so did Dr.

Michael DeBakey, who in 1963, said that in 10 years, at least 100,000 people would be walking around with artificial hearts in their chest.

(classical music) (spaceship launching) It turned out it was easier to send someone to the moon.

Many people in that world will tell you that the heart is just a pump, and that's why they thought it would be easy to replicate.

(heartbeat thumping) The trouble is, the heart beats an incredible number of times a day.

Replicating that turned out to be extremely difficult.

Early artificial hearts had a diaphragm that was constantly flexing.

(mysterious music) They just wore out.

It's really in a way, a story of failure, after failure after failure.

DR FRAZIER: It was hard for us to make a pump that was durable.

Dr.

Frazier thought that trying to replicate the pumping of the heart was never gonna work.

It had to be something centrifugal.

There were friends and associates that he relied on to advance this idea, but the most important person was Billy Cohn.

Bud Frazier is one of the most brilliant physiologists in the world, and knows more about this space than anybody.

But, he's not an engineer.

MIMI: Dr.

Cohn and Dr.

Frazier, what they did was build on something called the left ventricular assist device, which helps the left side of the heart by spinning the blood through the heart.

Bud Frazier had the next big eureka that if we used two of these, maybe that's an artificial heart that'll last longer.

The device worked, but it was a complicated device.

(dramatic music) We published it and got a lot of publicity.

We were on the cover of Popular Science, and newspapers around the world.

And probably the most important thing that came out that, is we met this brilliant, brilliant young man, Daniel Timms.

His father had bad heart failure, and Daniel wanted to invent an artificial heart to save his dad.

His father ultimately died of heart failure, but Daniel just redoubled his efforts, and just put his whole life into it.

When I was a graduate student in Australia, I didn't know anything about artificial heart.

So I went straight to literature, and half of the articles I read are authored by Dr.

Frazier.

Dr.

Frazier was just at that time, starting to utilize spinning discs, and that gave the inspiration then to say, "Well, why don't we work on something?"

Daniel flies down to the United States from Brisbane.

And he comes in after being on a 16-hour flight, he's got a backpack, and he dumps the stuff out on my desk.

There was something that had a bunch of wires hanging out of it that looked like the alternator from a Volvo.

Billy Cohn took one look at it, and it was like, "Oh my God, this is it."

And that device would evolve into the BiVACOR Total Artificial Heart.

Can show you.

So that spinning disc is rotating around inside the device, about 2,000 revolutions per minute, in a suspended magnetic field.

Since there's only one piece, and it's not touching anything, there's no mechanical wear, it should last forever.

(gentle music) When I finally got a text from Dr.

Frazier, I couldn't quite believe it.

The Texas Heart Institute and BiVACOR are pleased to announce the world's first implant of the BiVACOR Total Artificial Heart in a critically ill 57-year-old man who is in cardiogenic shock, and awaiting a heart transplant at Baylor St.

Luke's Medical Center.

(gentle music) There will be a lot more human trials before they can take a device like that to market.

But it's a major medical breakthrough.

I think with innovation, it's never just one person if you start looking at it.

But I think Frazier is the common figure.

He brought different people together to make this happen.

I don't care about any notoriety.

And I'm pleased that this technology has worked, and I can see patients alive that wouldn't be alive otherwise.

It will change the way we treat heart failure.

(bright music) This is a story about a device that changed the restaurant industry forever.

So it's 1971, and Mariano Martinez is opening his first restaurant.

(utensils clinking) On opening night, a huge crowd shows up.

And the bartenders cannot keep up with the orders.

The customers were waiting for their margaritas, and they were getting hot under the collar.

When the margaritas actually came, they weren't good, because the bartenders were just throwing everything in the blenders without measuring it to crank 'em out.

The whole thing just turned into a disaster by the time the evening was over.

Mariano realized that if he was really going to be a success, he needed to keep the margaritas flowing.

My name is Pat Sharpe, I'm the restaurant critic at Texas Monthly, and I wrote the story "In the Limelight."

I have been working at Texas Monthly for 50 years.

By the time I started at Texas Monthly, Mariano had already invented the frozen margarita machine.

But it wasn't until he had that anniversary in 2021 that I became aware.

50 years?

That is an incredible news peg.

So I'd got in touch with him, and as soon as he started talking about it, I knew that it was a story that I wanted to pursue.

(speaking Spanish) What can they say?

SPEAKER: All white.

That is a vibe.

I'm the White Knight, baby.

Okay, my name is Mariano Martinez.

Pronounced in Spanish, Mariano.

And I'm the inventor of the world's first frozen margarita machine.

Mariano grew up in Dallas in the 1940s and the 1950s.

And there was a lot of prejudice against people of Mexican origin.

He wanted to be a success for himself.

He wanted to be a success because he was a Mexican-American.

It was really, really important to him.

And he thought, "Well, there's one thing that I do know.

And that's Mexican food."

Mariano's mother and father were both in the Mexican restaurant business, so he knew that really well.

So that was his career path.

So it's 1971, and Mariano Martinez is opening his first restaurant.

1971 was really a pretty pivotal point in food and beverage history in Texas.

(gentle music) 1971 was the year that the legislature passed liquor by the drink.

And so that meant that patrons didn't have to take bottles of liquor to the restaurant.

They could just go in and order a drink.

Liquor by the drink was a game changer for the Texas restaurant business.

And Mariano was counting on liquor by the drink and particularly frozen margaritas to be a mainstay of his new restaurant.

(gentle music) But on opening night, too many people were ordering frozen margaritas, and the restaurant couldn't keep up.

It was shaping up to be a disaster.

My heart sunk.

And I just saw my success going down the tubes.

And so I went to the bartender to get on him.

"What the hell are you doing?"

He showed me his hands, and they were all pruned, and he said, "This is too much work."

I said, "Let me find a solution."

Well, they say necessity is a mother of invention.

The next morning, Mariano said he got up early, and he went to a 7-Eleven to get a cup of coffee.

While he was there at the counter, he watched a little girl order a Slurpee.

It just hit him like a bolt out of the blue.

If that machine can make a Slurpee, it can make a frozen margarita.

That was his moment of great inspiration.

I wish that would happen to me with wording of a story.

(bright music) So he got in touch with a friend, and they went to a secondhand store, and they bought a soft-serve ice cream machine.

They changed the compressor, they put in a bigger motor, and then he started tinkering with the actual formula.

Alcohol never freezes.

We found that if we added more simple syrup, we could get it to freeze.

This was the very moment that the frozen margarita machine was invented, and came into the world.

(dramatic music) It was such a success, they just became mainstays.

It certainly changed bar culture.

People loved that machine.

So many people told me, "After I had two margaritas, I couldn't stop, and I had two more."

PAT: Other restaurant owners started coming in and saying, "Hmm, we could do this with frozen daiquiris.

We can do this with pina coladas."

It ended up having this outsized effect that spread far beyond the boundaries of his one little restaurant in Dallas, Texas.

(dramatic music) At some point, the Smithsonian Institution decided that it ought to be commemorated.

See, there it is!

The original first machine.

It is now on permanent display at the Smithsonian, right next to Julia Child's kitchen.

I wanted that.

I just threw it out there to the universe.

That's what I wanted for my life.

The frozen margarita machine validated him as a businessman, an inventor, and a person who really had value of Mexican origin.

(bright music) I think an innovator is somebody who is able to look at a situation and come up with a solution that is not logical.

There is even a little element of magical thinking in it.

(gunshot exploding) Dr.

Kendall is the definition of an innovator.

He found a horrible problem he was passionate about trying to find a solution, and then after years of effort, he finally accomplished that.

This passion for innovation, it's a very Texas story, it's a very American story.

And one of the great things you can say about humans is that there are people like this who just see a problem and they can't stop till they solve it.

(bright music) SPEAKER 1: Land has always been a big part of Texas's identity.

When the land starts to change, what happens to this way of life that people have lived for generations?

SPEAKER 2: I think it would be very sad if we lost the rice industry in this area.

SPEAKER 3: It's getting to be much of a normal thing around here.

SPEAKER 4: Losing that connection?

That is so terrifying to me.

(keyboard clacking) SPEAKER 5: I love it!

We're on the precipice of a great discovery!

(upbeat music) ♪ I love it ♪ Fasten your seatbelt.

(dramatic music) SPEAKER 6: As long as we're together, it's perfect.

SPEAKER 7: Love is not as simple as you seem to think.

SPEAKER 8: We're so close to cracking the case.

Dreams do come true, hey lad?

SPEAKER 9: Major funding for this program was provided by, SPEAKER 10: At H-E-B, we're proud to offer over 6,000 products grown, harvested, or made by our fellow Texans.

♪ I saw aisles and miles ♪ SPEAKER 10: It's all part of our commitment to preserving the future of Texas, and supporting our Texas neighbors.

(gentle music) SPEAKER 11: Texas Parks and Wildlife Foundation is dedicated to conserving the wild things and wild places in Texas.

Learn more at tpwf.org.