"Baby Fae" and the Baboon Heart

A Daring Surgical Procedure.

On 15 November 1984 at Loma Linda University Medical Center in southern California, a tiny baby girl died twenty days after she had heart surgery. The hopes of many died with her. For "Baby Fae," as she had come to be known, died with the heart of a baboon pumping blood through her body. The baboon heart experiment offered hope that animal organs could be used in ailing infants for whom transplant organs were difficult to obtain. Baby Fae was born with a fatal congenital deformity known as hypoplastic left heart, which left the entire left side of her heart useless. A successful transplant from a baboon promised a new life for Baby Fae and a revolution in pediatric heart surgery.

Xenografts.

Dr. Leonard Bailey, chief of pediatric heart surgery at Loma Linda, had experimented with interspecies transplants for seven years, grafting lamb hearts into baby goats. Many of the goats lived as...

[The entire page is 992 words long]

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