Magdi Yacoub

Sir Magdi Habib Yacoub (born 16 November 1935 in Bilbeis, Egypt) is an Egyptian-British heart surgeon and professor of cardiothoracic surgery at Imperial College London; he established the heart transplantation programme at Harefield Hospital in 1980, performed the UK's first combined heart and lung transplant in 1983, founded the Chain of Hope charity and the Aswan Heart Centre, and was knighted in 1992 and appointed to the Order of Merit in 2014 ^{1 2}.

Yacoub was born in Bilbeis to a Coptic Christian family whose head, his father, was a surgeon, and spent his childhood moving between small Egyptian towns; he entered Cairo University's medical school at fifteen, graduated in 1957, came to England in 1962 to train with Sir Russell Brock and Donald Ross, and in 1968 held a post at the University of Chicago, where, as the Arabic article records, he married on 21 December 1968 in a small church at the university, before becoming a consultant at Harefield in 1973 ^{1 2}. His faith is recorded as Christian on documentation: two independent texts name the man himself Coptic — the English article's lead calls him 'a Coptic Egyptian-British' professor, and a peer-reviewed biographical article in Baylor University Medical Center Proceedings describes him as 'an Egyptian and a Christian Copt' ^{1 3}.

With Donald Ross he adapted the Ross procedure for valve repair and devised the arterial switch operation for transposition of the great arteries; at Harefield in 1980 he founded the transplant programme whose first patient, Derrick Morris, became Europe's longest-surviving heart transplant recipient, and in December 1983 he performed the UK's first combined heart and lung transplant. He held the British Heart Foundation chair of cardiothoracic surgery from 1986 to 2006, operated on the actor Omar Sharif in 1993, founded the Chain of Hope charity to treat children in developing countries, and co-founded the Magdi Yacoub Global Heart Foundation, which opened the Aswan Heart Centre in 2009; he retired from the NHS in 2001, had been knighted in 1992, and received the Order of Merit in 2014 and the Lister Medal in 2015 ^{1 2}.

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