Hello, I'm Kirstie Young, and this is a podcast from the Desert Island Discs archive

for rights reasons we've had to shorten the music. The program was originally broadcast in 1995,

and the presenter was Sue Lawley.

My co-host away this week is a surgeon born in Egypt 60 years ago. He's recognized as one of the great pioneers of heart transplants surgery in this country.

It's a position that has not been achieved without enormous controversy.

Some of his experiments, such as when he kept a child alive by connecting him to a baboon,

provoked public outcry. But these days, his heart transplant operations enjoy a 90% success rate.

If you don't want to do anything experimental, he said, you don't want to do anything new.

You have to keep exploring the limits. He is Somagdi Akub.

You could almost say these days, Professor Akub, that heart transplants are routine.

Does that mean that, in a sense, you've stopped exploring the limits?

Not at all. Although there has been a lot of improvements and achievements in the transplantation field,

there are still a lot of problems and a lot of areas which need to be explored,

which are current to being explored, problems like what we call chronic rejection,

that the heart's developed a degree of coronary disease.

So there is narrowing of the coronaries again. There are tumors, there could be cancer,

there are rejection, infections, or right, it's not very common, but it needs to be eradicated.

So when it said that you have a 90% success rate, what does that mean?

The 90% is in a subset of patients who have ideal characteristics,

sicker patients have anything like 80% or sometimes even 70%.

But what does that mean? That means that at the end of one year, 80 to 90% of the patients are alive,

but they have a five-year chance of survival of something like 65%,

...