Fearing Animal Rights Protest, Baby Fae’s Doctor Cancels Talk

Dr. Leonard Bailey, who implanted a baboon’s heart in Baby Fae, canceled a speech on the ethics of the operation after learning it was open to the public, a spokesman at Loma Linda University Medical Center said today.

Bailey, chief of pediatric surgery at Loma Linda, was to have spoken Wednesday to a medical class at UC Irvine on the ethics of organ transplants.

However, medical center spokesman Doug Schaeffer said that Bailey wasn’t aware when he agreed to speak that the talk would be open to the public.

He said animal-rights groups, which have been critical of Bailey, had placed posters around the community in an effort to attract opponents.

“UCI said it could be a hostile audience,” Schaeffer said. “That is significantly different than what Dr. Bailey had agreed to.”

Because of safety concerns, Loma Linda’s security office offered to let Bailey wear a bulletproof vest, but Bailey decided to cancel his appearance, Schaeffer said.

Last October, Bailey and a team of surgeons at Loma Linda University Medical Center placed a walnut-sized baboon heart into a 12-day-old infant identified as Baby Fae, who suffered from a heart malformation. The infant died 20 days later.