Dr. Muhammad Mansoor Mohiuddin graduated from Karachi's Dow Medical College in the 1980s, before garnering international acclaim for successfully completing what experts termed a major milestone for organ transplants.
Recalling his former classmate, Muneer Amanullah said, "He would be so interested, always there, always available and always ready to get involved in surgery,"
"There was exhilaration that this has been done by a graduate from this college," said Dow College vice-chancellor Muhammad Saeed Qureshi.
"I think... the whole team is in for it, in for the Nobel Prize," speculated the vice chancellor.
Not everyone has been as excited about the medical procedure. For some Muslims, pigs are considered unclean, and some Islamic scholars have decried the surgery as impermissible in Islam.
For others, the procedure amounts to a 'medical miracle.'
"In religion, no deed is as supreme as saving a human life," said Pakistani Islamic scholar Allama Hasan Zafar Naqvi.
It took Dr. Mohiuddin and his team 18 years of research to get to this point. "They are the best surgeons, the best physicians, the best anesthetists, and so on," Mohiuddin said of the University of Maryland medical team that worked through the seven-hour surgery.