undertake such an operation, or that his participation in such a high-profile operation at a leading white hospital could have avoided public notice during apartheid. 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: "In December 1967… Naki, with amazing dexterity, removed the donor heart from Darval, irrigated it with electrolyte solution and passed it to Barnard." "1967 Dr. Christiaan N. Barnard of South Africa performed the world's first human heart transplant operation… Working with a team that included… black South African surgeon Hamilton Naki…." "One of the most interesting people I learned and read about was Hamilton Naki. He assisted Dr. Barnard with the first transplant in 1967…." 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: Tollie Lambrechts, a member of the transplantation team, said Naki "was definitely not in the operating room on that night." Dene Friedmann, a member of the transplantation team, said Naki "was not here that night, the only people here were the ones that would actually do