Sir Magdi Yacoubمجدي يعقوب

Yacoub was born on 16 November 1935 in Bilbeis, in Egypt's Sharqia province, into a Coptic Christian family. He is said to have decided to devote his life to heart surgery after his aunt died of heart disease in her early twenties — a loss that gave him his life's purpose. He entered the Cairo University College of Medicine as a teenager and qualified as a doctor in 1957. Drawn by the rapid advances in surgery abroad, he moved first to Denmark and then, in 1962, to Britain, where he trained at leading hospitals, spent a period teaching at the University of Chicago, and in 1969 began the long association with Harefield Hospital in London that would make his name.

Yacoub became one of the great innovators of cardiac surgery. In the late 1960s his team pioneered the use of human heart valves as replacements, and he helped develop the Ross procedure (the Ross–Yacoub operation), in which a diseased aortic valve is replaced with the patient's own pulmonary valve. He devised the arterial switch operation to correct a dangerous congenital defect in newborns. At Harefield he established Britain's leading heart-transplant centre, performing one of the country's first heart transplants in 1980 — on Derrick Morris, who survived for 25 years to become Europe's longest-living transplant recipient — and Europe's first heart-lung transplant in 1983. He went on to build what became the largest heart and lung transplantation programme in the world, with more than 2,500 operations.

For Yacoub, surgery and science were inseparable. He held a professorship of cardiothoracic surgery at Imperial College London for over two decades, authored well over a thousand scientific papers, and trained generations of surgeons and researchers. After stepping back from routine operating, he founded the Magdi Yacoub Institute at the Harefield Heart Science Centre, where teams of scientists investigate the molecular causes of heart disease and pursue the frontier of tissue engineering — working toward the dream of growing replacement heart valves, and even heart tissue, from living cells. His drive to keep innovating earned him a reputation as a fearless "maverick" of medicine.

Perhaps the most moving part of Yacoub's story is his charity. He is the founder and president of Chain of Hope, which brings life-saving heart surgery to children with correctable conditions from war-torn and developing countries, free of charge. He co-founded the Magdi Yacoub Heart Foundation — together with the Nobel laureate Ahmed Zewail and others — which built the Aswan Heart Centre in southern Egypt, offering world-class cardiac care to Egyptians regardless of their ability to pay. Well into his later years he has continued to return to Egypt to operate on sick children for free. For his contributions to medicine and humanity he was knighted and honoured with the Order of Merit, election to the Royal Society, and Egypt's Order of the Nile.

• Who he is: an Egyptian-British cardiothoracic surgeon and pioneer of heart transplantation.
• Arabic name: مجدي يعقوب (Magdi Yacoub).
• Born: 16 November 1935, Bilbeis, Egypt.
• Training: Cairo University Medical School (qualified 1957); moved to Britain in 1962.
• Pioneering work: the Ross–Yacoub and arterial switch operations; Britain's leading transplant centre at Harefield.
• Milestones: one of Britain's first heart transplants (1980); Europe's first heart-lung transplant (1983).
• Scientist: founder of the Magdi Yacoub Institute; over 1,000 papers; pioneer of cardiac tissue engineering.
• Charity: founder of Chain of Hope and the Magdi Yacoub Heart Foundation, which built the Aswan Heart Centre.
• Honours: Knight Bachelor, the Order of Merit, Fellow of the Royal Society, and the Order of the Nile.

Sources include Encyclopedia.com, the Magdi Yacoub Foundation, Al Majalla, and other accounts of Sir Magdi Yacoub's surgical and charitable work.