Cape Town, South Africa — To honor a little known heart transplant pioneer, Morehouse School of Medicine (MSM) President Emeritus and former Secretary of the U. S. Department of Health and Human Services, Dr. Louis W. Sullivan has established a new scholarship at the University of Cape Town (UCT) in South Africa.

Mrs. E. Ginger Sullivan accompanied her husband to South Africa for the September 4, 2007, ceremony. The Sullivans presented a scholarship check for $12,000 from United Therapeutics Inc., of Silver Springs, Md. to UCT student Moses Matlhadisa. The check is the first of six annual checks for that amount given to UCT to establish an all-expense scholarship for each of the six years of study toward the MBChB degree, which is the equivalent to the MD degree in the United States. United Therapeutics will support a second student for six years when Matlhadisa graduates.

The Scholarship is named in honor of Hamilton Naki, a Black South African who rose from the position of gardener at UCT to become a skilled laboratory technician at the university. After helping to develop the techniques, Naki assisted Dr. Christian Barnard in performing the first human heart transplant operation in 1967 at Grootes Schurr Hospital in Cape Town. Last year, Groote Schuur Hospital and the University of Cape Town celebrated the 40th anniversary of that first successful human heart transplant.

Naki received no public recognition for his key role in the historic event until years later, when he was awarded the National Order of Mapunqubue in Bronze in 2002. He received an honorary degree in 2003 from UCT.

Naki taught surgical transplant techniques to more than 3,000 medical students and doctors in South Africa. Christian Barnard often referred to Naki as "my surgeon." Ironically, Naki was always listed on the UCT employment roster as a "gardener." He received only the pay of a senior laboratory technician. He retired from UCT in 1991 and died in 2005.

The parallelism between the circumstances involving the lives and work of the Christian Barnard/Hamilton Naki partnership at UCT in South Africa in 1967, and the 1944 Alfred Blalock/Vivien Thomas collaboration at Johns Hopkins Medical School in the U.S., is striking. Thomas, a young African American who was forced for financial reasons to leave his first year of college, came to work for Blalock in his laboratory. He learned to assist Blalock, a Caucasian heart surgeon. Together, they performed the first successful, life-saving operation on a child with a congenital heart defect (Tetrology of Fallot). Blalock became world famous, and although Thomas played a key role in developing the operative procedures in the animal laboratories at Hopkins, he received no public recognition until years later.

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