South African surgeon
Hamilton Naki (26 June 1926 – 29 May 2005) was a laboratory assistant to cardiac surgeon Christiaan Barnard in South Africa. He was recognised for his surgical skills and for his ability to teach medical students and physicians such skills despite not having received a formal medical education, and took a leading role in organ transplant research on animals.
A controversy arose after his death in that at least five periodicals and the Associated Press retracted statements in their obituaries of Naki that claimed that he participated in the world's first human-to-human heart transplantation in 1967; the incident has been cited as an example of inadequate fact checking by the newsmedia and delayed corrections of the errors.
Early life.
Naki was born to a poor family in Ngcingwane, a village in Centani in the Eastern Cape province of South Africa. He received six years of education up to the age of 14, after which he moved to Cape Town. Beginning about 1940, he commuted from Langa, Cape Town to the University of Cape Town to work as a gardener, specifically rolling grass tennis courts.
Medical career and retirement.
In 1954 Robert Goetz of the University's surgical faculty asked Naki to assist him with laboratory animals. Naki's responsibilities progressed from cleaning cages to performing anaesthesia. Most of Naki's work under Goetz involved anaesthetising dogs, but Naki also assisted in operating on a giraffe "to dissect the jugular venous valves to determine why giraffes do not faint when bending to drink."
Several years after Goetz left, Naki started working for Christiaan Barnard in the laboratory as an assistant. Barnard had studied open-heart surgery techniques in the United States and was bringing those techniques to South Africa. Naki first performed anaesthesia on animals for Barnard, but was then "appointed principal surgical assistant of the laboratory because of his remarkable skill and dexterity." Barnard was quoted as saying "If Hamilton had had the opportunity to study, he would probably have become a brilliant surgeon" and that Naki was "one of the great researchers of all time in the field of heart transplants".
In 1968, Barnard's cardiac surgical research team moved out of the surgical laboratory, and Naki helped develop the heterotopic or "piggyback" heart transplantation technique. In the 1970s, Naki left Barnard's team and returned to the surgical laboratory, this time working on liver transplantation. His contributions at this time were described as follows:
Naki taught many students during his career; although newsmedia accounts placed the number of students in the thousands, Hickman said that that number appears to have been exaggerated. Naki assisted Hickman until his retirement in 1991, after which he received "a gardener's pension: 760 rand, or about $275, a month."
Personal life, post-retirement activities and recognition, and death.
Naki was reported to be married with four sons and one daughter. He lived in a small one-room house without electricity or running water and sent "most of his pay to his wife and family, left behind in Transkei," but "could pay for only one of his five children to stay to the end of high school." He was active in his church and read the Bible frequently.
After retirement, Naki helped the community of Kentani, where part of his family lived, for example "in the construction of a school and in the provision of a mobile clinic" by soliciting donations from his "medical contacts". He received public recognition of his medical work after his retirement, including:
He died in Langa on 29 May 2005, aged 78, of "heart trouble."
Controversy concerning participation in 1967 heart transplantation.
After Naki's death, obituaries published 9 June 2005 to 2 July 2005 in at least two medical journals ("The BMJ" and "The Lancet"), one magazine ("The Economist"), two newspapers ("The Independent" and "The New York Times"), and an unknown number of newspapers publishing Associated Press stories, printed obituaries that made the following claims about Naki's participation in the world's first human-to-human heart transplantation:
Between 14 July 2005 and 3 September 2005, the five aforementioned periodicals and the Associated Press issued formal retractions of statements in their obituaries of Naki that claimed that he participated in the world's first human-to-human heart transplantation. The reasons given for the initial mistakes included:
Evidence cited in 2005 that Naki was not present at the first transplant included:
Instead, the surgeons who removed the heart from the donor were Marius Barnard (Christiaan Barnard's brother) and Terry O'Donovan.
Despite the retractions, the claim that Naki participated in the 1967 heart transplantation has been perpetuated in journal articles and books published after 2005. Examples include:
A 2007 book traced the origin of the incorrect story to a 1993 article in the Associated Press that stated "Barnard had Naki on his heart-transplant backup team. … When Barnard performed the first heart transplant in 1967, Naki was part of the backup team at Groote Schuur Hospital in Cape Town." The story's "blossom[ing] into accepted fact" was partly attributed to neither Barnard's nor Naki's taking steps to refute the story. The 2007 book noted that the 2005 corrections in the newsmedia "did not include any statement about adopting new procedures to prevent the same thing from happening again."
A documentary film "Hidden Heart" which was released widely in 2009 included interviews with Christiaan Barnard and Naki suggesting that Naki was present at the 1967 heart transplantation. Marius Barnard was quoted as describing the claims in the film that Naki removed the donor heart as "rubbish, a joke, it’s a total distortion of the facts" and as stating that Naki was at the time "in his bed, about 8 km away from Groote Schuur". The co-director of the film "acknowledge[d] that Naki was not present the night of the operation." A South African Broadcasting Corporation investigation after the release of the film quoted five people about the event:
The German surgeon Stefan von Sommoggy, who worked with Naki in South Africa for a year and, unlike many of his South African white colleagues, was on friendly terms with him, denied in a letter to the editor of the renowned German medical newspaper "Ärzteblatt" in response to the documentary " Hidden Heart" that Naki's participation in the operation in any form could be ruled out for two reasons. Firstly, due to the colour of his skin but also due to his lack of medical qualifications, he was not able to access the surgical area. Secondly, Naki's technical skills were quite limited. Although he was able to show students how to transplant dog hearts, his crude technique due to the lack of medical training made it impossible for him to show the much more difficult pig heart transplant. Von Sommoggy referred to Naki as a friend who, under the circumstances of his life, could not be capable of such a feat. All the more he emphasized Naki's desire to be able to do something for the education of future generations, so that they would have the basics that are needed for such specialized activities.
References.
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