Word: loma
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Dates: during 1980-1989
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...placing of a baboon heart into the chest of little Baby Fae caused indignation in many quarters. For some, who might safely be called eccentric, the concern was animal rights. Pickets outside Loma Linda University Medical Center and elsewhere protested the use of baboons as organ factories. Dr. Leonard Bailey, the chief surgeon, was not impressed. "I am a member of the human species," he said. Human babies come first. It was unapologetic speciesism. He did not even have to resort to sociology, to the argument that in a society that eats beef, wears mink and has for some time...
...well, the big issue was made out to be the public's (read: the press's) right to know. There were reiterated complaints about withheld information, vital forms not made public, too few press conferences. It is true that in its first encounter with big-time media Loma Linda proved inept at public relations. But how important can that be? In time the important information will be published and scrutinized in the scientific literature, a more reliable setting for judging this procedure than live television...
...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...
...altar of science: the Tuskegee experiment, in which a group of black men with syphilis were deliberately left untreated for 40 years; the Willowbrook experiment, in which retarded children were injected with hepatitis virus; and the Brooklyn study in which elderly patients were injected with live cancer 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...
...Loma Linda doctors did not. Hence the unease. One does not have to impute venal motives-a desire for glory or a lust for publicity-to wonder about the ethics of the choice. The motive was science, the research imperative. Priority was accorded to the claims of the future, of children not yet stricken, not yet even born...