Baby Fae is a month-old infant (named Baby Fae by doctors to protect her parents’ anonymity) who received the first baboon-heart transplant.
Baby Fae was born with a hypoplastic left heart syndrome, an almost always fatal deformity found in newborns in which parts or all of the left side of the heart is missing.
On October 26, Dr Leonard L. Bailey performed the world’s first baboon-to-human heart transplant, replacing the 14-day-old infant’s defective heart with the healthy, walnut-size heart of a young baboon. The baby survived the dangerous operation. Prior to the procedure, no infant heart transplant—even with human hearts—had been successfully performed due to a lack of infant human hearts
After living longer than any other human recipient of an animal heart, the baby’s body rejected the transplant, and on November 15, 1984, after 20 days, Baby Fae died.
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