Word: baboons
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...transplant from a human donor could theoretically be used to help such babies, Bailey was discouraged by the drastic shortage of infant hearts. Seven years ago he began investigating the possibility of using hearts from other species, or xenografts. He performed more than 150 transplants in sheep, goats and baboons, many of them between species. Last December, after what Bailey called "months of agonizing," the Loma Linda institutional review board gave him preliminary approval to implant a baboon heart in a human infant. The final go-ahead came just two days before Baby Fae's surgery. "There is evidence that...
Meanwhile, Sandra Nehlsen-Cannarella, a transplantation immunologist brought in from New York City's Montefiore Medical Center, conducted five days of laboratory tests to determine which of six baboons at Loma Linda most closely matched Baby Fae's tissue type. However, before the tests were complete, the infant's heart suddenly deteriorated and her lungs filled with fluid. The dying child was swiftly transferred to a respirator and given drugs to keep her blood circulating. The measures were able to sustain her long enough for a baboon donor to be chosen and surgery to begin. (Read "The Using of Baby...
...metabolism, allowing her other organs to better tolerate a reduced blood flow. One hour and 45 minutes into the operation, Bailey descended three floors to the basement, where the hospital maintains a colony of 29 primates. There, he removed the walnut-size heart of a seven-month-old female baboon, the animal that had proved to be the best match for Baby Fae, and placed the organ in a cold saline "slush." Elapsed time: 15 minutes...
Back in the operating room, Bailey removed Fae's defective heart and replaced it with the heart from the baboon. Because baboons have only two major arteries leaving the aortic arch, as opposed to the three in humans (see diagram), two of the baby's vessels were first joined together before being connected to one of the two arterial openings in the baboon's aorta. When the delicate plumbing job was completed, doctors slowly raised the infant's temperature and weaned her from the heart-lung machine. At 11:35 a.m. on Oct. 26, four hours and five minutes after...
...supplementary pump. He decided to abandon the technique because of the poor results and the risks of becoming "emotionally attached" to donor chimpanzees, which, he says "are very much like humans." Barnard is nonetheless enthusiastic about the Baby Fae case and has no qualms about the use of baboons, which, he says, are shot on sight by South African farmers, who consider them a nuisance. Perhaps the strangest example of simian-human surgery was tried in 1975 by Cardiologist Magdi Yacoub in England. In an effort to sustain the life of a one-year-old boy during extensive surgery, Yacoub...