Lionel H. Opie, MD, DPhil, DSc, FRCP is Professor of Medicine Emeritus, Hatter Institute for Cardiovascular Research in Africa, Department of Medicine, University of Cape Town.
After graduating from the University of Cape Town, he was a Rhodes Scholar at Oxford and later worked with Sir Hans Krebs, Nobel Laureate. With Richard Bing, he established the Journal of Cellular and Molecular Cardiology in 1970. After the first Heart transplant by Barnard, Opie was invited back from London in 1971 to develop basic heart research in Ischaemic Heart Disease, for which he received a MRC Unit (1976-1998). He was Visiting Professor (1984- 1998) at Stanford University, California. From 2003–February 2010, he was Director, Hatter Cardiovascular Research Institute, Department of Medicine.
His major book, “Drugs for the Heart”, Elsevier, was first published as six articles in the Lancet with the 8th edition co-edited with Gersh in 2013. The British Medical Journalists gave first prize to “Living Longer, Living Better” (Oxford University Press, 2010).
In 2006 received the highest Presidential award in South Africa, the Order of Mapungubwe, being cited as internationally the best known cardiologist in Africa after Barnard. In 2011 he became Senior Scholar at the University of Cape Town. In 2012 he received top (A1) research grading and grant support from the National Research Council of South Africa. In 2012 he received the Honorary DSc degrees from the University of Stellenbosch, “for his contributions as an internationally acclaimed cardiologist, his formidable and virtually unequalled research output, for his pioneering work on the energy metabolism of the heart, and for his exceptional talent as author and lecturer to translate complex scientific processes into comprehensible concepts.”
He has had the on-going honour of developing Cardiology at the Limits with Derek Yellon, at whose suggestion they initiated the series in 1997. In 2012 they were cited on The Lancet front cover as “fostering the exchange of science and medicine between African and European continents”.