This Article  • References  • Full text PDF  • Send to a friend  • Save in My Folder  • Save to citation manager  • Permissions  Citing Articles  • Citing articles on HighWire  • Citing articles on Web of Science (25)  • Contact me when this article is cited  Related Content  • Similar articles in JAMA  Social Bookmarking   What's this?

Arthur L. Caplan, PhD

JAMA. 1985;254(23):3339-3343.

	Since this article does not have an abstract, we have provided the first 150 words of the full text PDF and any section headings.

ON OCT 26, 1984, Dr Leonard Bailey and his associates at the Loma Linda University Medical Center in California implanted a heart from a 7-month-old baboon in a newborn human infant. The child, known publicly as Baby Fae, was afflicted with a fatal congenital abnormality of the heart known as hypoplastic left heart syndrome.¹

The implant created an enormous controversy both within the medical community and among lay observers of the experiment. The questions it raised and continues to raise concern the competency of the child's mother to give informed consent to the procedure, the morality of killing an animal in order to attempt to save the life of a child, the adequacy of the scientific basis for undertaking this type of transplant in a young child, the competency of the medical team and medical center to undertake the experiment, the adequacy of existing review mechanisms governing human experimentation . . . [Full Text PDF of this Article]

Author Affiliations
From The Hastings Center, Hastings-on-Hudson, New York.

Footnotes
Reprint requests to The Hastings Center, 360 Broadway, Hastings-on-Hudson, NY 10706 (Dr Caplan).

CiteULike    Connotea    Del.icio.us    Digg    Reddit    Technorati    Twitter     What's this?