Michael Ellis DeBakey (September 7, 1908 – July 11, 2008) was a world-renowned Lebanese-American cardiac surgeon, innovator, scientist, medical educator, and international medical statesman. DeBakey was the chancellor emeritus of Baylor College of Medicine in Houston, Texas and director of The Methodist DeBakey Heart & Vascular Center and senior attending surgeon of The Methodist Hospital in Houston.

Sir Magdi Habib Yacoub FRS (born 16 November 1935 in Belbis, Egypt), is Professor of Cardiothoracic Surgery at Imperial College London. He was involved in the first UK heart transplant in 1980, carried out the first UK live lobe lung transplant and went on to perform more transplants than any other surgeon in the world. A 1980 patient Derrick Morris, was Europe’s longest surviving heart transplant recipient until his death in July 2008.

Ibn Al Haytham , better known in Europe as Alhacen, made significant contributions to the principles of optics, as well as to anatomy, astronomy, engineering, mathematics, medicine, ophthalmology, philosophy, physics, psychology, visual perception, and to science in general with his introduction of the scientific method. He is sometimes called al-Basri after his birthplace in the city of Basra in modern day Iraq. He was also nicknamed Ptolemaeus Secundus (“Ptolemy the Second”) or simply “The Physicist” in medieval Europe.

Ibn Sina or commonly known in English by his Latinized name Avicenna wrote almost 450 treatises on a wide range of subjects, of which around 240 have survived. In particular, 150 of his surviving treatises concentrate on philosophy and 40 of them concentrate on medicine. His most famous works are The Book of Healing, a vast philosophical and scientific encyclopaedia, and The Canon of Medicine, which was a standard medical text at many medieval universities. The Canon of Medicine was used as a text-book in the universities of Montpellier and Louvain as late as 1650.