The World - News from May 15, 1987

Magdi Yacoub, one of Britain’s leading transplant surgeons, performed two operations involving live heart donors before American surgeons in Baltimore did the operation this week, a spokesman for London’s Harefield Hospital said. Like the operations completed Tuesday in Baltimore, the transplants in Britain gave a new heart and lungs to two people suffering lung defects, while their healthy hearts were given to people with heart disease, spokesman Mark Purcell said. Yacoub performed the first operation in April and the second in the first week of May, he said. The American surgeons had said they thought their operations were the first of their kind.