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: