The Nation : Animal Heart Transplants

Animal hearts will be transplanted successfully in humans before artificial hearts with comparable capabilities can be developed, a surgeon said at a Tucson conference on transplantation issues sponsored by the University of Arizona Heart Center. Dr. Edward B. Stinson, who heads the heart transplant program at Stanford University, said that foreign tissue transplantation will provide the “ultimate product that we’re all seeking” within the next 20 or 25 years. Doctors in Loma Linda, Calif., created controversy in October, 1984, by transplanting the heart of a baboon into a newborn infant, identified as Baby Fae, who lived about three weeks before her body rejected the donor organ.