Christina Falloon gets teary-eyed when she describes how her 51/2-year-old daughter Krysta recently scored the first goal of the season for her soccer team.
"If it weren't for Baby Fae, my daughter wouldn't be here today," said the 31-year-old mother from Buellton, whose daughter received a human heart transplant in 1988 that saved the 3-week-old girl's life. "We're grateful for that baby. It's sad she didn't make it."Baby Fae was the 12-day-old infant who on Oct. 26, 1984 - 10 years ago Wednesday - received a walnut-size baboon heart in an operation at Loma Linda University Medical Center, 60 miles from Los Angeles. The first infant to receive an animal organ survived 201/2 days; her full name was never released.
In the decade since Baby Fae's death, the science of suppressing rejection has advanced and human-to-human transplants have been fine-tuned to where patients are surviving longer.
At the same time, Americans have been forced to consider the limits of medicine, the ethics of subjecting a newborn to experimental surgery, the phenomenon of living with an organ from another species and questions of animal rights.
During Baby Fae's brief life, people were fascinated and horrified by the prospect of an animal organ enabling her to overcome a fatal heart defect. But deep within her body, forces Dr. Leonard Bailey still hadn't conquered were working against his surgical handiwork.
Bailey, who was accused of making a premature leap across the species barrier, believes he knows enough now to avoid the pitfall of Baby Fae's transplant. It wasn't organ rejection but incompatible blood types that took her life.
"The important legacy with her is she stimulated the concept babies could be transplanted and deserved to be transplanted as well," Bailey said. "We've been able to create a new form of therapy for severe heart disease in infants as a result of her legacy."
In the intervening years, Bailey has transplanted human hearts into 250 babies, 173 under 6 months. Loma Linda said 85 percent are alive today.
Bailey, the 52-year-old chairman of surgery at Loma Linda University School of Medicine and chief surgeon at the university's Children's Hospital, said the Baby Fae case also stimulated organ donations, although about 25 percent of children in need still die waiting. Each year, only 300 hearts become available for the nearly 3,000 babies who could benefit, he said.
Bailey had expected by now to be using baboons to fill that gap. But he hasn't implanted a baboon heart since Baby Fae.
"I haven't given up on it," said Bailey. "I hope society will permit this over time."
Dr. Michael Barr, associate professor of surgery at the University of Southern California School of Medicine, said he, too, is optimistic about using animal-to-human transplants, or xenografts, to overcome organ shortages.
But he said: "I don't know anybody with a crystal ball who will be able to predict when we'll have had enough experience and progress in research to be able to say xenografting is ready to be applied on a large-scale clinical level."
Arthur Caplan, director of the Center for Bioethics at the University of Pennsylvania, said employing experimental surgery on children raises ethical questions.
"From the ethics point of view, it's better to first try subjects who can understand, to use someone other than a baby who can't give consent to an experiment that is almost certain to fail," Caplan said.
But doctors given the choice of doing something vs. nothing are hard to rein in, said Alexander Capron, professor of law and medicine at the University of Southern California and co-director of the Pacific Center for Health Policy and Ethics.
If Bailey goes ahead with more transplants, he can expect protests from animal-rights activists.
Such operations "constitute murder, human experimentation at best," said Beth Sweetland, director of research and investigations for People for Ethical Treatment of Animals in Rockville, Md. "If he has any intention of making another human child go through what Baby Fae went through, then I'd have to say he's mad.
"It's just not meant to be. We were not meant to have other species' organs inside our bodies," she said.