Word: organized
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Dates: during 1980-1989
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Following what is now standard practice in heart transplants, Bailey transferred his tiny patient to a heart-lung machine, using it to gradually lower her body temperature from 98.6° F to about 68° F. The lower temperature slowed the baby's 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...
...Christiaan Barnard, the South African pioneer of heart transplants, made two attempts to use simian hearts: in a 26-year-old woman, who survived for only six hours, and in a 59-year-old man, who died four days after surgery. In each case, Barnard "piggybacked" the animal organ onto the patient's own heart to act as a 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...
...general, the obstacle to using animal organs is that the human body quickly rejects foreign tissue. What gave Leonard Bailey hope of better results was the advent of the wonder-drug cyclosporine. Developed by Sandoz Ltd. in Switzerland, cyclosporine inhibits organ rejection by partly suppressing the immune system. It is considered safer than earlier drugs used for this purpose because it is less likely to destroy the body's ability to fight infection. Since its first use in the U.S. in 1979 it has revolutionized transplant surgery, raising the one-year survival rate of heart recipients from...
...demonstrating Bailey's point, critics charged that xenografts are still too uncertain and that other treatments should have been considered. Dr. Moneim Fadali, a cardiovascular surgeon at the University of California, Los Angeles, was one of several physicians to suggest that the decision to use an animal organ may have been "a matter of bravado" and that a human heart "would have offered the child a better chance of survival." Loma Linda Surgeon David Hinshaw explained that he and his colleagues believed that the hope of finding a compatible human heart in time to save the dying Fae was "almost...
Ironically, the heart of a two-month-old infant was available the day of Fae's operation. Transplant coordinators from the Regional Organ Procurement Agency at UCLA called Loma Linda hospital to offer the infant's kidneys (the heart was not discussed because Loma Linda does not have a human-heart-transplant program). When word of the potential human donor became public last week, Loma Linda officials explained that the call from the procurement agency had come after the baboon heart was implanted, that the heart of a two-month-old might have been too big for Fae, and that...