Leonard L. Bailey

Who is Leonard L. Bailey?

Leonard Lee Bailey a board-certified surgeon with expertise in several areas and chief of pediatric heart surgery at Loma Linda University Medical Center. Bailey performed the first xenotransplantation procedure on October 26, 1984, when he placed the heart of a baboon into the chest of "Baby Fae", an infant born with a severe heart defect known as hypoplastic left heart syndrome. Her true identity was kept strictly confidential, so the moniker "Baby Fae" was disseminated throughout world media sources until her mother later revealed her full name: Stephanie Fae Beauclair. Baby Fae only lived 21 days before she died, but this event marked the dawn of infant heart transplants, although baboon and other non-human hearts are no longer used. Still, the additional 21 days was seen as an improvement over the 2–10 day life expectancy of those babies with HLHS.

The Baby Fae case, and Bailey's role in it, has been a popular case study in the realm of medical ethics. Bailey did not look for a human heart for Baby Fae. There were questions over whether the baby could give informed consent to paritipate in such an experimental procedure, or whether parents should be allowed to volunteer children, and whether the parents themselves were properly informed by Bailey. A human heart had been available on the day of the surgery; also Fae's mother had no medical insurance and the xenograft was offered for free. When asked why he had picked a baboon over a primate more closely related to humans in evolution, he replied "Er, I find that difficult to answer. You see, I don't believe in evolution." Charles Krauthammer, writing in Time, said the Baby Fae case was totally within the realm of experimentation and was "an adventure in medical ethics." Ultimately, the American Medical Association and top medical journals criticized Bailey.