Nadey S. Hakim FASMBS (born 9 April 1958), is a British-Lebanese professor of transplantation surgery at Imperial College London and general surgeon at the Cleveland Clinic London. He is also a writer, musician and sculptor, known for kidney and pancreas transplantations, and being part of the surgical team that performed the world's first hand transplantation in 1998 and then the double arm transplantation in 2000. Several of his sculptures are on display around the world, including President Macron at the Élysée Palace in Paris, Pope Francis at the Vatican, Michelangelo's David in the Madonna del Parto Museum collection, and Kim Jong-un at the Pyongyang Museum in North Korea. After graduating in medicine from Paris Descartes University now called Université Paris Cité and completing his surgical training and Fellowships from Guy's Hospital in London, the Mayo Clinic and the University of Minnesota in the States, the Soviet Union and University College London, he became appointed to St Mary's Hospital where in 1995, he performed London's first pancreas transplantation. He was part of the team that performed the first kidney transplantation in the Arab world in 2003, during the Iraq War, and later developed a kidney transplant technique using an unusually small incision. The procedure was depicted in Henry Ward's 2010 painting The 'Finger-Assisted' Nephrectomy of Professor Nadey Hakim', commissioned to raise awareness of legal organ donations. Subsequently, in 2013, he performed the first kidney transplantation in Abuja, Nigeria. Following an 'unfair' dismissal by Imperial College Healthcare NHS Trust in 2015, he was reinstated in 2016 after a tribunal. In the same year, he received the Chevalier de la Legion d'Honneur at a ceremony held at the French Embassy in London. The following year, Imperial appointed him as their president's envoy. Between 2018 and 2019, he became visiting professor of surgery at the Faculty of Medicine in Belgrade, and received an Honorary Doctorate from the Beirut Arab University and a Doctor of Arts degree from the University of Bolton. His role in writing and editing have included producing over 23 textbooks and 150 peer-reviewed papers, being editor-in-chief of the International Surgery and an editorial board member for the journals Transplantation Proceedings and Graft. In his role in global health issues, he has been involved in collaborations tackling disease in Africa and has raised the issue of the risks of unregulated trade in organ donation. As a musician, he plays the clarinet and his performances include the hymn 'Jerusalem', dedicated to the children of Lebanon, and in A Time Remembered as a tribute to Air France pilot, Michel Bacos.
Early life and education Nadey S. Hakim was born in Britain, in 1958 into a Lebanese family. As a teenager, when in Lebanon, he witnessed the war. He later recalled that while the city was under fire from bombs and rockets, "the thing I used to do was put my headphones on and listen to music because I played the clarinet. Schools were closed… We didn't think we would survive." He spent this time reading and learning languages, eventually nine in all including French, Italian, German, Russian, Arabic, Hebrew and Japanese, and fled Lebanon before completing school. He was inspired by his father.
Career
Hakim is a laureate of Cochin Port Royal Hospital Medical School and received his MD from Paris Descartes University in 1984. He subsequently began his surgical training at Guy's Hospital, London. In 1988, he completed a fellowship in gastrointestinal surgery from the Mayo Clinic, before gaining an International College of Surgeons (ICS) travelling scholarship to the Soviet Union in 1989, and then returning to London to finish his thesis on intestinal transplantation and receive his PhD from University College London in 1991. In 1993, he completed his surgical training at Guy's, before being awarded a fellowship in transplantation at the University of Minnesota, which he completed in 1995.
In 1995, he performed London's first pancreas transplantation at St Mary's Hospital and began the first pancreas transplant programme in South East England.
Limb transplantation Hakim had hoped that the world's first hand transplantation would be performed in London. Instead, representing Britain, in September 1998, then working at St Mary's Hospital, London, he joined the team led by Jean-Michel Dubernard at the Édouard Herriot Hospital in Lyon, that then performed the world's first hand transplantation, an operation that took 14 hours. The recipient of the donor hand, Clint Hallam, failed to follow aftercare directions and later requested that the transplanted hand be removed. Hakim amputated the hand in February 2001 in London. In 2000, he was one of 20 surgeons, led by Dubernard, involved in the transplantation of two arms on a 33-year-old Frenchman who had lost both his arms in an explosive accident fours years earlier.
Kidney transplantation He revealed in an interview that one of the surgeons who inspired Hakim and whom he met, was the American Joseph Murray, who performed the first successful kidney transplantation in 1954, an operation involving two identical twins and the donor being live. In an article in Experimental and Clinical Transplantation (2016), Hakim recalled being invited to Yemen by professor Hussain Al Kaff to visit Aden, Yemen to attend the first International Yemeni Conference on Nephro-Urology in March 2003, during the Iraq War. During the visit, a Saudi team led by Faissal Shaheen from the Saudi Centre for Organ Transplantation, together with the Austrians, Robert Fitzgerald, Felix Stockenhuber and Annilies Fitzgerald, and Hakim who led Al Kaff's doctors from Aden, performed 10 operations, consisting of five living related kidney transplantations in one sitting over 20 hours, despite political instability and its near abandonment. These were the first kidney transplantations in the Arab world, which, as a result, led to the establishment of The Arab European Foundation, with the mission "to help poor Arab countries" and the motto of "poverty should not be a barrier to health or education!".
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