Professor Magdi Yacoub was born in Egypt and graduated from Cairo University Medical School in 1957. He moved to Britain in 1962 and went on to become a consultant cardiothoracic surgeon at Harefield Hospital. He rose to prominence when he was involved in Britain’s first ever heart transplant operation, earning him a reputation as one of the world’s leading heart surgeons.
Yacoub carried out the UK’s first arterial ‘switch’ operation, as well as Europe’s first heart-lung transplant, the world’s first ‘live lobe’ transplant (of lung lobes donated by living patients), and perfected the Ross procedure (replacing the aortic valve with the patient’s own pulmonary valve). He has performed more transplants than any other surgeon in the world.
In his Letter to My Younger Self, Magdi Yacoub recalls on his schooldays, the influence of his parents and meeting Nelson Mandela.
As a teenager I loved life. I loved sports. I loved swimming. I was captain of the football team. I also worked hard in school and was very quiet. I had friends, but I was not talkative. To the extent that people said, that boy is mentally defective. Why doesn’t he talk? Then when I came top of the class, they said, What? He must be cheating. But I was not cheating. I was just working hard because I loved academia. I read huge books, and people said, “That’s ridiculous. What are you doing?” I said, “I’m enjoying it. I’m acquiring new knowledge.”
Magdi Yacoub as a child
I wanted to do heart surgery because of two things. One, I had role models. My dad was a doctor, but even more influential was my aunt, his younger sister, who died of a narrow heart valve. My dad had nearly had a nervous breakdown and kept saying she should not have died, because people were starting to open valves surgically. So as a little boy I said, I am going to be a heart surgeon. And I never veered. My dad mentioned certain names in the UK and the US, and I said, I will target these people and work with them. One was the pioneer Russell Brock, who became Lord Brock. I became his first assistant and learned from him massively.
My mother spoke French so I tried to speak French, but she also was artistic, playing the piano, “Moonlight Sonata” by Beethoven. I loved music, and that has continued with me. I love classical music, and art is essential for science. And my father, of course, was a big influence in terms of helping people and being a surgeon and influencing society. So both of them contributed to my development, and obviously I’m very grateful to them for acting as role models in certain ways.
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If I was to live my life over I would exactly follow the same pathway I went through. This is what I tell young people today when they ask me how to succeed. I say it is relatively simple. There are three letters you have to follow: PPH. The first P is passion. It can happen that people tell you that you should do something else. Or, this particular speciality is dead, we have done everything to be done, find something else. You shouldn’t listen to all that. Follow your passion. The second P is persistence, keep going along a path, not right, left, up, down. And what is H? Humility. It is essential in life, and in science in particular, to be humble.
Why? Because you can talk to kings and queens but the most important thing is to talk to the poor and the desolate and identify with them. So humbleness is essential in life, and it’s even more essential in science, because when you discover something which has the potential to save millions of people, you think, ah, I am at the peak of my career now. I have discovered the top of the mountain. But actually it’s not. When you look up, the mountain is much higher, and what you have reached is just a little elevation. So to be humble is absolutely essential, both in life and science.
I wasn’t always sure of myself. I was confident that I was working very, very hard and I gave the air that I knew what I was doing. On the other hand, I went on to get the fellowship of the Royal College, first of Edinburgh, then of Glasgow, then of London. And I didn’t stop there. I went and got the Irish fellowship. Why did I do that? I don’t know. I was a bit trying to prove to myself that actually I can do it.
At the start of my career I hated the sight of blood. My uncle was a general surgeon, so while I was at medical school, he said, come and assist me in an operation. And so I stood there, and when he cut the skin and I saw blood, I fell to the ground. And they said, you think you’re going to be a surgeon? And I said, I will pursue it. And I became confident, because if I am in charge, I feel confident that I can stop the bleeding. But if I see blood which I cannot control, I actually faint.
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Magdi Yacoub as a young academic
Throughout my career, I have been interested in research, and for several reasons. One is to try and achieve excellence, always criticising ourselves in order to do better. But the other thing is to discover things which can influence society around the world, in terms of humanity. Throughout five decades of working with heart valves I learned that a living heart valve actually does incredible things. Early on I was repairing valves but even then they have to be replaced eventually. But eventually we found a technique – if you put in an acellular scaffold, it actually attracts your own stem cells, then houses them and instructs them to be a fully functional valve. We have patented that, and we are pursuing that very avidly through a company. People say academia can never take anything to the market but we are working very hard. To give that to humanity would be my biggest thing in my whole career.
I learned from nature, because biology is supreme. While we do have artificial things, the tissue living well is supreme. I learned a lot through experience in transplantation. Initially transplantation was thought to be unethical, experimental nonsense. They said people will not survive for two years. Now we know patients can survive 36 years after transplantation, when they were originally doomed to die in a short time.
Also we discovered that you can actually put the new heart beside the old heart. On one occasion, I had a patient who came to the hospital several times, dying, and we had available a very small heart which could tide her over. So I put the small heart beside her heart. And behold, in two to three years, her own heart recovered completely. After a while we took the transplanted heart out, and she is now, 30 years later, living with her own heart, which has recovered completely. So this is the story of two hearts that beat as one.
When will I ever retire? I really love what I’m doing, and what keeps me living is my work. I have given everything I know, and I keep trying to do that, working with young people. The minute I stop working I’m sure I will die in a very short time. When I am working with young people, although I’m not doing it myself, I do stand by the table, guiding them and working with them. They know a lot now as well. So guiding them is not the right word, it’s more actually discussing with them. Asking where do we go from here, both in the operating room and in the laboratory. So I love my work, and the minute I stop, I’m going to die.
Magdi Yacoub attending the Chain of Hope Gala Ball 2025 at the Natural History Museum in London. Image: SOPA Images Limited / Alamy
If I could have one last conversation with anyone it would be Nelson Mandela. I had the incredible honour and pleasure to spend several hours talking to Nelson in his home and it had a profound effect on me. We talked about how he felt about saving generations of people, about feeling guilty for the bloodbath in South Africa. In that room where we were sitting, there was a picture of Gandhi. And he said, call me Madiba, which is like Mahatma. One of the things that stuck in my mind was how gentle he was.
If I could relive any time it would be when I used to travel by Concorde a lot. I used to stay at the hospital until one hour before the departure of Concorde, then I rushed to the airport. One day I just remember so vividly – I arrived just 20 minutes before the departure of Concorde to be greeted by a stunningly beautiful young lady. I still remember her. And she greeted me, “Professor Yacoub!” and I said, “How do you do? You know me?” She said, “You operated on me when I was a baby when nobody else could. I had an inoperable problem, and you kept me alive.” And I said, “Oh my god, this is fantastic. Thank you, that makes me so happy.” And the guy who was helping me with my heavy luggage said, “I wasn’t going to say anything, but you operated on me too.” And I said, Oh my god!
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