John Buckels was born in Liverpool in 1949 and was educated at St Mary’s College and then Birmingham University Medical School where he graduated MB ChB in 1972. He embarked on a career in surgery and gained his FRCS in 1977. He spent 1984-5 doing research at UCLA which led to the award of an MD in 1986. That year he was appointed Consultant Surgeon (with a special interest in transplantation) at the Queen Elizabeth Hospital, Birmingham. His early years there coincided with the development of liver transplantation in the UK and he pioneered cutting down adult livers for small children, splitting a liver to be shared between an adult and a child as well as small intestinal transplants in children.
The Birmingham Liver Unit is recognised as one of the most active in the world with a major throughput of liver and pancreatic cancer operations as well as over 3300 liver transplants performed of which his personal tally is approaching 1000. In 2002 he was awarded a CBE for his contributions to transplantation and in 2005 he became Professor of Hepatobiliary and Transplant Surgery at Birmingham. He has published widely on surgical and transplant topics and has been visiting Professorship at Bristol, the University of Western Australia and the University of Cape Town.
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