HEART PROBLEM

A Ravensmead family are claiming that the late Prof. Chris BARNARD "stole" the heart of one of their family members and used it in the heart transplant of Dorothy FISHER in 1969 at Groote Schuur Hospital. Pieter GIER was 39 when he died. Groote Schuur Hospital has stated that he was not the donor. His wife Mavis (80) said that his body had strange cut marks on his chest when the family saw the body after a post-mortem. Gier was flown from Calvinia to Groote Schuur after being in a car accident with three friends, while on their way to Kakamas, eleven days before the transplant on Dorothy. Gier had neck injuries and died on 17 April 1969. The first heart transplant patient, Louis WASHKANSKY, received the heart of Denise DARVALL in 1967. She died in a car accident in Observatory, Cape Town.

COLON CANCER TRACED TO ANCESTOR

Cancer researchers have traced a married couple who sailed to America from England in about 1630, and believe that this couple is the reason why many people in the USA are at higher risk of a hereditary form of colon cancer. George FRY and his wife were married in Somerset, England, and immigrated to America with at least two of their children - a boy who passed the mutated gene to the New York family and a girl who passed it on to Mormon pioneers to Utah. One of the parents was the originator of the mutated gene linked to colon cancer. Almost 400 years after setting foot in America, the genealogy connecting the FRYs to family branches in Utah and New York was found by Deborah NEKLASON, a geneticist at the University of Utah's Huntsman Cancer Institute. The mutation was confirmed in the two families by blood tests and linked through genealogy to the FRYs, the only connection between the New York and Utah branches. The genetic mutation has not been found anywhere else in the world besides America. Researchers found 13 other families in Texas, Nebraska, Washington, Michigan, Wisconsin and Vermont with the same mutation. Though researchers at the University of Utah had studied the Utah family branch for about 20 years because of a high occurrence of colon cancer, they were unable to link them with the New York branch. Two years ago, NECKLASON tracked the common last names in each family. She traced one of the families further back, came across a familiar name and that led to George FRY and his wife. This study highlights that you need to pay attention to your family history.