Professor Stephen Westaby, surgeon and writer

Professor Stephen Westaby, surgeon and writer

From Desert Island Discs by BBC Radio 4

April 12, 2026 · 51 min

About this episode

Professor Stephen Westaby discusses his career as a heart surgeon and his pioneering work with artificial hearts.

Professor Stephen Westaby is a former heart surgeon and writer. During his career he performed over 11,000 operations and pioneered the use of life long artificial hearts as an alternative to donor transplants. Stephen was born in Scunthorpe in 1948 and went to medical school at Charing Cross Hospital in 1966. The following year he suffered a serious head injury during a rugby match which had a major impact on his personality. He changed from being a shy person lacking in confidence into a fearless, ambitious operator – qualities, he believes, made him entirely suited to being a surgeon. In 1981 he took up a Research Fellowship in Alabama with John Kirklin, the first surgeon to successfully perform a series of open-heart operations using a heart-lung machine. During his time there Stephen discovered that medical nylon caused some patients to die of post-perfusion syndrome. Following his discovery, the manufacturers of the equipment removed it from the circuit which led to a substantial drop in cardiac surgical mortality. In 2000 he implanted a revolutionary new heart pump into a man who was terminally ill with heart failure using a device called the Jarvik 2000. Temporary devices…

People in this episode

Guest: Professor Stephen Westaby

Topics covered

  • medicine
  • surgery
  • artificial hearts
  • personal transformation
  • medical innovation

Keywords

  • heart surgery
  • artificial hearts
  • medical innovation
  • post-perfusion syndrome
  • NHS

Mentioned in this episode

Organizations: NHS

Products: Jarvik 2000

Places: Scunthorpe, Alabama

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