Stuart William Jamieson (born 1947) is a British cardiothoracic surgeon, specialising in pulmonary thromboendarterectomy (PTE), a surgical procedure performed to remove organized clotted blood (thrombus) from pulmonary arteries in people with chronic thromboembolic pulmonary hypertension (CTEPH).
In his early career, he wrote on xenograft hyperacute rejection and in December 1980 was part of the team that performed the first successful human heart transplant using the then newly discovered immunosuppressant cyclosporine. In 1981, he was part of Bruce Reitz's team that performed the world's first successful combined heart-lung transplant procedure at Stanford University. Following that, he continued to make significant contributions to heart-lung transplant procedures, and led programmes in cardiothoracic surgery in both adults and children.
In 1986, he was elected president of the International Society for Heart and Lung Transplantation (ISHLT), whilst he was professor and head of cardiothoracic surgery at the University of Minnesota. Later, he became dean of cardiovascular affairs and chair and distinguished professor of surgery at the University of California, San Diego, where he co-founded the Sulpizio Cardiovascular Center.
Early life and education
Stuart Jamieson was born in 1947 and brought up in Rhodesia (now Zimbabwe), where he was educated at Falcon College. His childhood was spent on a 2.5 million acre ranch with pets that included a zebra, an ostrich and a giraffe. At the age of 18, Jamieson was sent to St Mary's Hospital, affiliated with the University of London, to study medicine. He financed his studies by working as a waiter.
Background
The first combined heart-lung transplant was accomplished by Denton Cooley in 1968, in Houston, in a two-year-old girl with severe pulmonary hypertension. Despite surviving less than a day, her case showed that this kind of procedure could be effective. The second such transplant was performed in 1969, by C. Walton Lillehei at Cornell University Medical Center in New York City, in a 43-year-old man with emphysema. He lived for eight days. In 1971, South African Christiaan Barnard, also performed a combined heart-lung transplant in a 49-year-old man with emphysema, surviving for 23 days. The poor survival rates of these early transplantations, primarily resulted from inadequate immunosuppression and difficulties with joining the airways. In addition, Joel D. Cooper had found corticosteroids to weaken the bronchial anastomosis. It was on this background of tragic deaths that Jamieson later acknowledged and shared his research on xenograft hyperacute rejection.
Early surgical career
Following 1971's Life Magazine's media coverage of failed early heart transplantations, Jamieson published his first papers on xenograft hyperacute rejection in 1974 and 1975.
In 1978, the American Heart Association awarded him a fellowship to study at Stanford University under the pioneering heart surgeon Norman Shumway, who had performed the first human heart transplant in America in 1967. Jamieson completed his residency in 1980 and stayed on as chief resident at Shumway's request. Later, he was listed in Clinical Cardiology (2000), as one of Norman Shumway's distinguished trainees.
Before 1980, just under 40 lung transplantation procedures had been attempted, all of which resulted in the patient's death within a few months and just one resulted in the patient's discharge from hospital. In 1979 at Stanford, Jamieson performed 25 heart transplants, comprising more than 50 percent of the total performed globally at that time.
In 1979, he described a series of successful transplantations in primates using cyclosporine, a fungal derivative whose immunosuppressive properties were reported by Jean-Francois Borel. Observing Roy Calne's reports on how cyclosporine led to a reduction in acute rejection and consequent longer survival rates following liver and kidney transplantation, Jamieson then demonstrated the possibility of using cyclosporine in human heart-lung transplantations. Subsequently, with Edward Stinson and Norman Shumway, he published Stanford's achievements in a report in the British Medical Journal (BMJ) on "Cardiac transplantation in 150 patients at Stanford University". This report was one of the developments that supported the recommencement of heart surgery in the UK under Sir Terence English in 1979.
In December 1980, he participated in the first successful human heart transplant using cyclosporine. The recipient was then age 20 and still living in 2017 at the age of 58.
