Word: transplant
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...first man to undergo a heart transplant operation in New England died Sunday afternoon after his Harvard doctors tried in vain to find him a third heart...
...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...
...cross-species 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...
...impressed and surprised by the infant's record-setting survival. "This has been a success," says Dr. Donald Hill, chief of cardiovascular surgery at Pacific Presbyterian Medical Center in San Francisco. "They have demonstrated that there is a window early in life where the opportunity to make a successful transplant from a baboon to a human exists." But neither Hill nor other doctors foresaw any possibility of using simian hearts as a permanent solution to heart disease. "I think these transplants might be used to bide time until a human heart can be found," says Dr. Michael DeBakey, the pioneering...
Such stopgap measures are desperately needed. "There is a tremendous shortage of donor organs for infants," says Dr. Thomas Starzl, a leading liver transplant surgeon at Pittsburgh's Children's Hospital. He estimates that eleven out of twelve of his infant patients who are now waiting for liver transplants will die before suitable donors can be found. Baby Fae has already had one salutary effect. According to Barbara Schulman, coordinator for the Regional Organ Procurement Agency at UCLA, over the past three weeks the number of prospective infant donors referred to the agency has soared...