Word: fae
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...Baby Fae brought out defenders of man, beast and press. But who was defending Baby Fae? There was something disturbing-subtly, but profoundly disturbing-about the baboon implant. It has nothing to do with animal rights or the Frankenstein factor or full disclosure. It has to do with means and ends...
...turns out that before placing a baboon heart into the chest of Baby Fae, doctors at Loma Linda had not sought a human heart for transplant. That fact betrays their primary aim: to advance a certain line of research. As much as her life became dear to them, Baby Fae was to be their means...
...transplant research-is undoubtedly worthy. Human transplants offer little hope for solving the general problem of children's dying of defective hearts. There simply are not enough human hearts to go around. Baboons grown in captivity offer, in theory, a plausible solution to the problem. To give Baby Fae a human heart would have advanced the cause of children in general very little. But it might have advanced the cause of this child more than a baboon's heart, which, given the imperfect state of our knowledge, was more likely to be rejected...
...cells. Loma Linda was at the other extreme. Here, far from being at war with the therapeutic, the experimental was almost identical with it. But not quite. The baboon heart was ever so slightly more experimental, more useful to science (or so the doctors thought), more risky for Baby Fae. If it were your child, and you had two hearts available, and you cared not a whit for science (perhaps even if you cared quite a bit for science), you would choose the human heart...
Infants, who can decide nothing, are the difficult case. (If Baby Fae had volunteered for her operation, the ethical questions would evaporate.) Since infants are incapable of giving consent, the parents do so on their behalf. In Baby Fae's case what kind of consent did they give? If her parents thought that the operation might save their child (i.e., that it was therapeutic), they were misled. There was no scientific evidence to support that claim. The longest previous human survival with a heart xenograft was 3½ days. (Baby Fae lived 17 more.) The longest animal survival...