A biography of Indian cardiac surgeon Marthanda Varma Sankaran Valiathan, is presented. He was born on May 24, 1934 in Mavelikara town, near Thiruvananthapuram, Kerala, India and studied in a local Government High School. He went as a Fellow to John Gibbon of the Jefferson Medical College, Philadelphia in 1960 and got married to a Punjabi dental surgeon named Ashima. He did his first open heart surgery in 1950s after the invention of blood pumps by Gibbon.