A paediatrician in Galway has lost three years of research on children with cystic fibrosis after three laptops and a memory stick were stolen by burglars.
Dr Mary Herzig is pleading with the thieves to return the memory stick or hand over a copy of the data, which was being collated for a PhD thesis.
Her house in Doughiska on the east side of the city was broken into last week while she and her husband slept upstairs. The culprits took three laptops, a 4G memory stick, three digital cameras and a DVD player.
The computers contained three years of research completed for a thesis through Beaumont Hospital and the Children's Hospital in Melbourne, Australia.
The data contained critical information on children with cystic fibrosis, a condition that affects one in 1,400 children in Ireland, which has the highest incidence of the condition in the world. It was saved on two laptops, a blue Toshiba and a silver and black Compaq, and on the memory stick. She also had it backed up on her husband's laptop. The thesis was due to be published in June.
"I'm pretty much sick and a bit lost actually. I don't care about the goods - it's the data. It's years of work. They were my lifeline, and it's kind of important work that was almost completed," said Dr Herzig.
She is offering a €300 reward for the return of the memory stick or a copy of the master file. She can be contacted confidentially on maryherzig@hotmail.com.
This is the second time a student has lost precious research to thieves in a month. A third-year PhD student at NUI Galway had 18 months of work saved on her laptop, which was stolen on St Patrick's Day during a series of raids on apartments across Salthill.
The computer contained work on her thesis as well as work she was planning on publishing. Gardaí have so far failed to locate the culprits.