RENOWNED surgeon Prof. John Dark is putting down his scalpel after 30 years at the helm of one of the most successful heart and lung transplant centres in the world.

When he joined the Freeman Hospital’s Cardiothoracic Centre in Newcastle in 1987, heart transplants were in their infancy and outcomes uncertain.

But Prof. Dark brought with him the knowledge and experience gleaned from working with the great Sir Magdi Yacoub, who had started up the UK’s first transplant programme in London three years earlier.

From there, Prof. Dark travelled on to Canada to learn about lung transplantation. The year he arrived in Newcastle, the first single-lung transplant in Europe was performed. The first European double-lung transplant took place in 1990.

Since then, he himself has been instrumental in making the Freeman unit the most prolific centre for both heart and lung transplantation in the UK, and the third largest and most successful lung transplant centre in the world.

Of the 2,000 or so transplants carried out there, he has performed 500 of them himself.

Prof. Dark, who lives in Hexham, said the ability to give people their lives back had been the driving force of his career.

“I have been able to help very ill people, who have no chance of surviving, and restoring them to life... ,” he said. “These people have been too breathless to talk at all and yet 24 hours later they are chatting away and a week later, they can be walking home.

“I’m very proud to have been tasked with building Newcastle as one of the best lung transplant centres in the world which has helped countless people, including many very young patients with cystic fibrosis.”

Past president of the European Society for Organ Transplantation and of the International Society for Heart and Lung Transplantation, he still serves on the Council of the British Transplantation Society.

Since 2013, Prof. Dark has also been national clinical lead for the Department of Health’s NHS Blood and Transplant executive.

Fellow surgeon Asif Hasan said: “John is a giant in the field of cardiothoracic surgery and he was responsible in establishing cardiopulmonary transplantation at Newcastle, amongst numerous other innovative and pioneering techniques in the field of cardiothoracic surgery.

“This has not only benefited Newcastle, but has had a major impact right across the world.”