Magdi Yacoub

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.

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.

Greek Prime Minister Andreas Papandreou was moved to a north London hospital Thursday for surgery to be performed by Britain's leading heart specialist, the Greek Embassy said. It will be up to the surgeon, Dr. Magdi Yacoub, to decide when the prime minister will undergo the operation, said an embassy spokesman, who spoke on condition of anonymity. He said Papandreou was moved from St. Thomas' Hospital in southeast London, where he has been since Aug.

Doctors flown in from abroad to help treat ailing Greek Prime Minister Andreas Papandreou, hooked up to life-support systems, said Thursday that he still has a fighting chance. "There is a chance of the prime minister recovering," said Magdi Yacoub, a British surgeon who performed open heart surgery on Papandreou in 1988. But he said any recovery would not be "immediate or in the very near future."

A British girl is thought to have become the first heart transplant patient in Britain and possibly in the world to have had her donor organ removed and her own heart restarted, a London hospital spokesman said on Thursday. Hannah Clark, 12, of South Wales had a heterotopic transplant operation -- known as a "piggyback" because the donor heart is placed next to the original organ -- 10 years ago.

A University of Pennsylvania surgeon reported "encouraging" results Friday with operations to treat the invariably fatal heart disease that afflicted Baby Fae. Dr. William Norwood, chief of cardiothoracic surgery at the Children's Hospital of Philadelphia, said "as our experience has increased, the mortality has gone down."

A rare infant-to-infant heart transplant has been performed by the surgeon who last year transplanted a baboon heart into the infant known as Baby Fae, officials at Loma Linda University Medical Center announced Thursday. But citing the parents' request for confidentiality, the hospital said it was "unable to provide condition reports or any additional information specific to the case," except to say that the operation was performed Wednesday by Dr. Leonard Bailey.

The secretive man who built the Bank of Credit & Commerce International into a global giant by using powerful friends resorted to the same strategy of influence and intrigue when he became ill and desperately needed a new heart. Agha Hasan Abedi was rushed to a BCCI hospital in the winter of 1988 after a massive heart attack at his home here--his identity a carefully guarded secret because associates feared that word of his illness could shake the bank and even the worldwide financial system.

In an unprecedented feat, British surgeons implanted a donor heart in a dying toddler whose own heart was too weak to sustain life, then removed it 10 years later after the girl's own heart had fully recovered. The technique is unlikely to become widespread because of the severe shortage of pediatric donor hearts, but it suggests that better mechanical assist devices that take some or all of the load off a diseased heart could allow time for weakened hearts to heal themselves.

Omar SHARIF has been a screen actor for 50 years. Yet he is not one to mouth platitudes about this remarkable career achievement, which encompasses some 90 movies. In fact, few actors are more candid about their body of work. "I went 25 years without making a good film," he insists; on thinking back, he concludes it's nearer 30.