This quiz first appeared in the school edition of the New Indian Express. We would like to convey our thanks to them for permitting us to reproduce the quiz here.

1. Groote Schuur Hospital in Cape Town, South Africa was placed centre stage in the world's spotlight on December 3^rd, 1967. Why?
2. The first kidney transplants between living patients were undertaken in 1954 in B o s t o n a n d P a r i s . T h e B o s t o n transplantation, performed on December 23, 1954, at Brigham Hospital was performed by Joseph Murray, J. Hartwell Harrison, John P. Merrill and others. What was unique about the donor and recipient that eliminated any problems of rejection of the donated kidney?
3. In 1837, Samuel Bigger attempted the first corneal transplant that was successful. What was unusual about the donor and recipient?
4. Early blood transfusions (a form of transplantation) were fraught with risks as the concept of the ABO system of blood groups was unknown. Which Austrian biologist and physician discovered this concept in 1901?
5. What is the most common cause of brain death in India?
6. Which European country is the world leader in organ donation since it set up a network of transplant coordinators in 1989 at all hospitals to closely monitor emergency wards and identify potential donors within intensive care units?
7. What system of consent for organ donation is followed in Spain and many other countries that partly explain the high organ donation rate in these countries?
8. Ganesha and Daksha Prajapati could be used as example of “xenografts” in Hindu mythology. What are xenografts”
9. Patients with severe Type 1 diabetes with kidney failure rarely undergo a kidney t r a n s p l a n t c o m b i n e d w i t h t h e transplantation of another organ to treat the underlying disease. Which organ?
10. An unusual situation arises during lung transplants. Since the lungs function in close association with the heart, the lungs and heart are removed from the donor as one entity and transplanted into the recipient. While the recipient's lungs are diseased and therefore discarded, the heart may be perfectly healthy. This can then be transplanted into a second recipient who required a heart transplant! Thus the first recipient is also a donor! This unusual form of transplantation is nicknamed after a popular indoor game that uses tiles with black spots on them. What game?
11. What organ transplant did Steve Jobs have?
12. On 20 March 2010, a team of 30 Spanish doctors headed by Dr Joan Pere Barret of the Vall d'Hebron Hospital Madrid, carried out a transplant on a man named Oscar who had injured himself in a shooting accident. It became the first transplant of its kind in the world. What was the nature of the transplant? Clue: Think of a 1997 action thriller film directed by John Woo starring John Travolta and Nicolas Cage.
13. What transplant is performed for patients who have leukaemia (blood cancer)?
14. Which Hindi film star has a charity called “Being Human” that supports bone marrow transplant?

Organ Donation Quiz – Answers 

1. Professor Christiaan Barnard performed the first human heart transplant. The donor was a young woman, Denise Darvall, who had been struck by a car and suffered severe brain damage. Her father did not hesitate when approached for permission to donate her organs. Sadly, Mr Louis Washkansky, the recipient, only lived for 18 days, succumbing in the end to pneumonia, but his new heart beat strongly to the end.
2. The procedure was done between identical twins. For this and later work, Dr. Murray received the Nobel Prize for Medicine in 1990.
3. Bigger transplanted the cornea from a lab gazelle to another gazelle and the recipient animal showed signs of vision after the surgery. The world's first successful human cornea transplant was performed on December 7th 1905, by Dr. Eduard Zirm, making it one of the first types of transplant surgery successfully performed.
4. Dr Karl Landsteiner. Based on his findings, in 1907 the first successful blood transfusion was performed by Reuben Ottenberg at Mount Sinai Hospital in New York. Persons with blood group AB can accept donations of the other blood groups (universal recipient), and that persons with blood group O can donate to all other groups (universal donor). In 1930 Landsteiner was awarded the Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine in recognition of these achievements.
5. Road traffic accidents
6. Spain. Its coordination network is on a national, regional and hospital level. According to Dr. Rafael Matesanz, Director of the Organización Nacional de Transplantes in Spain, “Spain is the only country with a sustained increase of organ donation during the last 17 years.”
7. “Presumed Consent”. Several countries, including Spain, Austria, and Belgium, have opted for a change in legislation and introduced presumed consent, whereby organs can be automatically retrieved for transplantation after brain death unless donors have objected during their lifetime (an “opt out” system). In India and most countries, consent must be obtained from the donor's family before organ retrieval.
8. Transplantation of organs or tissues from one species to another!
9. The pancreas whose “islet cells” secrete the hormone insulin that controls the blood glucose level. Lack of insulin or the failure of the body's cells to utilise insulin causes diabetes.
10. Domino transplant
11. Liver transplant
12. Full face transplant (the movie is Face/Off)
13. Bone marrow transplant.
14. Salman Khan