The Nation : Chimp Transplants Urged

Surgeons at a New York City hospital want to use chimpanzee hearts to keep dying patients alive until a human heart is available, a newspaper reported. Doctors have submitted a proposal to perform the animal-to-human heart transplant to Columbia-Presbyterian Medical Center’s institutional review board, which must approve any research involving patients, the Daily News said. The last animal-to-human heart transplant was the 1984 “Baby Fae” case, in which a baboon heart was transplanted into an infant girl at a hospital in Loma Linda, Calif. The baby died about three weeks after the transplant. The newspaper reported that the proposal is based on a series of experiments at Columbia-Presbyterian in which hearts have been transplanted between baboons and cynomologus monkeys, a species from Southeast Asia.