Baboon Marrow Recipient in Isolation : AIDS: Patient recovering from experimental surgery won’t know for weeks whether it was successful.

Jeff Getty was in an isolation ward at San Francisco General Hospital on Friday reading newspaper reports about his landmark baboon bone marrow transplant as he began a nerve-racking three- to four-week wait to learn if he will live or die.

Getty submitted to chemotherapy and radiation treatments Thursday to destroy part of his bone marrow before undergoing the transplant that physicians hope will save his life.

“This is where it gets tricky,” Dr. Steven Deeks of UC San Francisco, who performed the transplant, told The Times on Friday. “No one has ever given even these low doses of radiation and chemotherapy to someone with AIDS, and it’s possible his bone marrow will be weakened profoundly.”

If Getty’s immune system does not recover and the baboon transplant does not take hold, Getty will be left defenseless against any infection and will probably die.

For the moment, however, “he is feeling as good as Jeff ever feels,” Deeks said. “But you have to remember that Jeff has AIDS and ongoing bronchitis and asthma. . . . [Nevertheless] his spirits are good.”

Over the next two weeks, Getty’s immune system--already devastated by the ravages of AIDS--will grow progressively weaker as the effects of the short course of radiation and chemotherapy take hold. That treatment was designed to kill off a small part of his bone marrow, Deeks said, to “make space” for the baboon marrow.

Getty will remain in isolation throughout the period to reduce the risk of any stray cold or influenza virus attacking. Family and staff will be able to visit, but only if they practice “strict hand-washing” and wear masks to prevent infecting Getty.

Sometime around New Year’s Day, if all goes as his physicians hope, his bone marrow will have begun manufacturing new white cells, building up his immunity once more.

Meanwhile, Deeks and his colleagues are watching closely to see if the baboon marrow injected Thursday night will take root in the core of Getty’s bones and begin to grow.

If the bone marrow grows successfully, and if it does not kill him in the process, the cells should give Getty, an AIDS activist and a former policy analyst at UC Berkeley, a reconstituted immune system that will help his natural immune system fight off infections.

And because baboon cells are not normally infected by the AIDS virus, the new immune system may even prevent further deterioration caused by the HIV infection.

If his immune system does recover, Getty, who is 38 and has been HIV-positive for nearly 15 years, could return to his Oakland home in a month.

Or, critics charge, he could be dead in two weeks. If the baboon cells grow, they could create a “graft-versus-host” reaction--in which the baboon cells would attack his body--that would kill him. Even if that does not happen, the cells might carry a baboon virus that could attack Getty in his weakened state and kill him. Some critics fear that those viruses could spread to other humans.

His isolation is designed as much to protect the people around him from baboon viruses as it is to protect him from stray infections, according to Deeks.

After two years of battling bureaucrats at the Food and Drug Administration to get permission for the controversial experiment, all Getty can do now is wait. Compared to those battles, the events of this week have been “rather unexciting,” Deeks said.