Forty years in the past immediately legendary surgeon Professor Sir Magdi Yacoub carried out the UK’s first coronary heart and lung transplant, saving the lifetime of Swedish journalist Lars Ljungberg who had approached the surgeon – already famed for his coronary heart transplants – as his final hope.

Experts within the United States had refused to function as they felt Mr Ljungberg’s organs had deteriorated too far. And though, sadly, he died 13 days later of an underlying situation, the pioneering operation itself was successful and paved the best way for hundreds of life-saving transplants to comply with.

“Mr Ljungberg was a wonderful man, very determined and intelligent, who came to Harefield Hospital and said, ‘It’s my last chance, what do I do now?’ I, for one, always feel you should have empathy with your patients, so we talked it over and I explained that it was a high-risk operation.

“It was a last chance, but a chance is a chance and I told him we were willing to give him that chance and, at the same time, it was very important that the operation should be established anyway. He was very motivated and happy to accept the risk, and said, ‘If I don’t make it, please play Mozart’s Requiem at my funeral, I will appreciate it.’ He was accepting, and very grateful we took him on. It proved to be a landmark operation which benefited many thousands of people.”

To date, greater than 3,500 folks have obtained twin coronary heart and lung transplants at Harefield, the place Professor Yacoub, now 88, developed the process in 1983.

He reveals to the Daily Express that he was on “auto-pilot” throughout the operation having already carried it out “hundreds of times” in his head whereas awake and as he slept.

“It is not a sleepless night. I do go to sleep, but my brain is so focused on the idea, which I have first cut into its component parts, that my subconscious continues to try to solve the problem,” he explains.

“When I got into the surgery it was actually very quick because the link between the hand and the brain is so well coordinated in my mind that I didn’t hesitate.”

Prior to this, he had launched modifications to coronary heart transplant surgical procedure that proved to be the bedrock of this extra advanced operation.

“I try very hard to equip myself with as much knowledge and skill as I can. Sir Russell Brock [the surgeon at Guy’s Hospital who he trained under], said that people think heart surgery is glamorous,” he recollects.

“It is actually very hard work. You have to be dedicated.

“And once you start an operation you have to stop being about emotion – even though you love this patient and their family – and concentrate completely.

“You become almost automatically fixed, like a machine, without emotion. During the operation, you have to be dedicated to the patient and think about nothing else beyond making what you are doing successful.

“Some people think surgeons are doing it for their own glory, but you are doing it for the sake of the patient who has nowhere else to go.”

Professor Yacoub tells me there have been roughly 20 colleagues with him that day, every with an essential function to play. The advanced operation was really in two components: taking the present organs out and placing the brand new organs in.

“The surgery itself was quite quick, but we don’t finish or give the reverse anticoagulation drugs [to help the blood clot] until we are absolutely sure [the patient is stable].”

So how does this humble, but eminent surgeon stability holding somebody’s life in his palms? He insists the accountability is eased by the information that, with out his intervention, the affected person has no future. “You are just a doctor trying to do your best.”

A biography of this big of medication has now been printed to coincide with the momentous anniversary of the operation. Professor Yacoub started the transplant programme at Harefield Hospital in 1980 with Derrick Morris, who turned Europe’s longest-surviving coronary heart transplant affected person till his loss of life, aged 75, in July 2005.

Two years later, he carried out a coronary heart transplant on John McCafferty, who survived for greater than 33 years, till February 10, 2016, and was recognised because the world’s longest-surviving coronary heart transplant affected person by Guinness World Records in 2013.

Both these pioneering operations have been the constructing blocks for the extra advanced coronary heart and lung transplant surgical procedure he was to pioneer within the UK.

Although he retired from the NHS in 2001, his charity, Chain of Hope, is bringing his model of life-giving medication to these with nothing. It creates hospitals providing free healthcare in Egypt, Rwanda and Ethiopia. In the method, this big amongst cardiovascular surgeons, whose spouse Marianne handed away from most cancers aged 71 in 2011, is offering a information trade programme to go on his experience.

He says: “A major part of my life right now is trying to present to humanity everything I have learned, with an element of continuity and sustainability.”

Born in Egypt on November 16, 1935, Professor Yacoub was impressed to turn into a surgeon after the loss of life of his youngest aunt in childbirth from an undiagnosed coronary heart valve problem that’s notably harmful in being pregnant. In truth, he tells me he was solely “five or six years old” when she died.

“It affected me because I saw my father having a nervous breakdown, and saying, ‘I lost my darling sister to a preventable cause’.

“And I said, ‘Don’t worry Dad, I will find a solution’. He told me about a Mr Brock who was working out how, and that he was in the UK.

“I told him I would study under him one day, and in fact I came the UK [in the early 1960s] and I did.” As the younger Magdi had matured, his father Habib – additionally a surgeon – continued to form his son for this essential future work.

“He said, ‘You are a bit disorganised and haven’t got what it takes to achieve all that.’ So I got really determined to correct
that and equip myself to try. He was a huge influence.”

The professor has three youngsters – pilot Andrew, 54, Lisa, 52, a charity supervisor, and physician Sophie, 48.

But it’s also the center itself that evokes his work. “I am totally in love with the heart,” he says with feeling.

“For one, unlike neurological disease, if you do something to the heart you see a result immediately. The other thing is that I have major respect for an organ that goes on silently beating, millions of times, without bothering anyone or making a fuss. Each heart has a personality; you need to know when you are dealing with its particulars.

“Many people, including me, thought it was just a pump. But it has now been discovered that it is an endocrine organ, connected to the brain by many nerves, that affects the function of the brain, and is influenced by the brain. The heart has a massive influence on our personalities.”

When I ask about reported instances the place the recipient of a donor organ believes their persona has altered following surgical procedure, as if some component of character has been transplanted together with the tissue, I count on him to be dismissive. He admits that, for a few years, he didn’t imagine this was potential.

“I used to deny it, but now I have my doubts. There could be something in it,” he says. He not too long ago obtained a letter from a transplant recipient in Canada. “She had loved classical music but after the transplant, her taste in music changed dramatically and she found she liked fast cars. She appears to have acquired some of the particulars of the donor,” he reveals.

“I’m not sure how to take it. Now I know about the mechanisms in the hormones secreted by the heart and the nervous communication [between the two], there could be some truth in it.”

“If we disregard it and say it cannot happen we are disregarding science, which is a quest for the truth.”

Ethical questions underscore his work, and I ponder if he would all the time favour a youthful recipient of an organ?

“It’s a very difficult question, and a good one,” he says. “In general, we base decisions on tissue-matching and organ size, but sometimes we ask, ‘Does the younger person always take precedence over an older person who could be helping many people, and having an impact on society?’

“We admit there are questions to which we have no answer.”

The conclusion of surgical procedure finds him in a state of “muted calm, and sometimes exhaustion” having deployed “massive concentration over a long period of time” on behalf of the sufferers who belief him. Surgeons are generally criticised for enjoying god, deciding who lives and dies. Professor Yacoub is the antithesis of this mindset. “The most important thing is to have humility. When people ask me now, ‘What is the secret of success’, it is really relatively simple,” he says.

“I tell them about ‘PPH’. Passion for what you are doing, so it is not just a duty but a vocation. Persistence – to follow your path you don’t need to be a genius, you just need to be persistent.

“But the last and most important thing is to be humble. Even after you think you have arrived at the top of the mountain, there is so much more to discover, as you find you are just on a little hill.

“If you are humble you can speak with royalty and to the most desolate person in Africa who needs help. Never be full of yourself. The human genome has shown that we are all equal.”

·        A Surgeon and a Maverick by Simon Pearson & Fiona Gorman (American University Press, £24.95) is out now. Visit expressbookshop.com or name 020 3176 3832. Free UK P&P on orders over £25