More Baboon Heart Transplants Proposed
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LOMA LINDA — Dr. Leonard Bailey, who outraged animal rights groups by putting a baboon’s heart into an infant girl in 1984, wants to perform at least five more of the transplants.
Bailey will ask the Loma Linda Medical Center review board this summer for permission to attempt five to seven transplants within a year, said hospital spokesman Dick Schaefer.
“He believes it will be 100% successful,” Schaefer said of the proposed procedures.
Bailey garnered world attention in October, 1984, when he implanted a baboon’s heart into 12-day-old Baby Fae. She died 20 days after the operation at Loma Linda Medical Center.
Bailey has said he believes Baby Fae died because her blood type and the baboon’s were not matched.
No animal-to-human heart transplant has been tried since. But on June 28, doctors in Pittsburgh, Pa., implanted a baboon’s liver into a 35-year-old man, who is doing well.
Bailey said baboon heart transplants could have helped save the lives of three infants who died last year by keeping them alive until human donors were available, Schaefer said.
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