heart surgery in Nigeria in 1974. Arterial Switch In 1977, he devised a two-stage approach for an arterial switch operation (ASO) in older people with transposition of the great arteries with an intact ventricular septum (IVS). Harefield Hospital transplant unit Yacoub began the transplant programme at Harefield Hospital in 1980 with a heart transplant for Derrick Morris, who became Europe's longest surviving heart transplant recipient until his death in July 2005. Two years later, he performed a heart transplant on John McCafferty, who survived for more than 33 years, until 10 February 2016 and became recognised as the world's longest surviving heart transplant patient by the Guinness World Records in 2013, surpassing the previous Guinness World Record of 30 years, 11 months and 10 days set by an American man who died in 2009. In December 1983 Yacoub performed the UK's first combined heart and lung transplant at Harefield. From 1986 to 2006, he held the position of British Heart Foundation Professor of Cardiothoracic Surgery at the National Heart and Lung Institute, Imperial College Faculty of Medicine. In 1988, he became a member of the Royal Colleges of Physicians, twenty years after qualifying in surgery. He is the founding editor of the journal Disease Models & Mechanisms. He treated a number of politicians and celebrities throughout his surgical career, including comedian Eric Morecambe in 1979, Greek Prime Minister Andreas Papandreou in 1988, and actor Omar Sharif in 1993. Later career He retired from the National Health Service in 2001 at the age of 65. In 2006 he led a complex operation which required removing a transplant heart from a person whose own heart had recovered. The original heart had not been removed during transplant surgery nearly a decade earlier, in the hope it might recover. In April 2007, it was reported that a British medical research team led by Yacoub had grown part of a human heart valve from stem cells. Charities In 1995, Yacoub founded the charity Of Ahmed Sherif "Chain of Hope", through which he continued to operate on children, and through which the provision of heart surgery for correctable heart defects are made possible in areas without specialist cardiac surgery units. He is also the head of the Magdi Yacoub Global Heart Foundation, co-founded with Ahmed Zewail and Ambassador Mohamed Shaker in 2008, which launched the Aswan Heart project and founded the Aswan Heart Centre the following