For lurkers and anyone else who wants solid information on the tragedy of Baby Fae
Baby Fae: The Unlearned Lesson
Address:http://www.curedisease.com/Perspectives/vol_2_1990/BabyFae.html
Here's a quote from the article regarding an interview:
"...The reporters had been forbidden to ask direct questions about the operation, so they queried Bailey on the issue of why he had chosen a baboon in view of the baboon's evolutionary distance from humans. Bailey replied, "Er, I find that difficult to answer. You see, I don't believe in evolution.""
Any questions?
aforesaid link is associated with antivivisection--this Baby Fae hokum is from a PETA-esque group.
Good grief. As if you can't go to the link, check out the mission statement...
Yes. Why do you think your link is the end all and be all to the situation? Here is more from the Loma Linda link mamzelle addressed to me.
Bailey's associates in neonatology and cardiology had too often experienced the heartache of having to tell young parents that there was no hope for their new babies. The only possibility for these babies to live a really normal, active life, he thought, would be a heart replacement. What about animal hearts? (Fifty thousand valves made of calf- and pig-heart tissues were used to replace faulty human-heart valves every year.)
But animal hearts had been tried unsuccessfully in adults on four occasions, the first time by Dr. James Hardy, on January 23, 1964, at the University of Mississippi. He transplanted the heart of a chimpanzee into the chest of a 68-year-old man in a last-ditch effort to save the man's life. But the patient was too weak and died almost immediately. Controlling rejection is usually the greatest challenge in managing a patient following organ transplantation. Rejection in a cross-species transplant would be even more difficult to control than in most human-to-human transplants.