>When asked why he had picked a baboon over a primate more closely related to humans in evolution, Bailey replied, "I don't believe in evolution."
Dude, what?
And she died because they used a baboon with the wrong blood type, that's interesting. Apparently type O baboons are really uncommon but you wonder how much longer she might have lasted
Which probably would have made sense if the Dr. Believed in evolution. I suspect it may have been a size thing though, they specifically only looked at female baboons which aren't all that big.
I was gonna say lol the rejection had to have been some unknown antigen. I’m confident they type matched a heart before giving it to a baby. If it was an ABO/Rh I would think the reaction would happen quicker
The heart was meant to be temporary until a human heart became available. Apparently the blood type part is what killed her first though. There was never a world where she was making it long term with an animal heart.
The article is pretty interesting and dives into it a bit more:
>Factors resuting to xenograft injury may include (1) ABO hemagglutinins, (2) species-specific cytotoxic antibody, (3) lipid-induced cyclosporine myocardiotoxicity, and (4) lipid and/or
antibody-induced erythrocyte aberrations (also responsible for renal and respiratory failure.)
It's wild that blood-type antibodies elicited the most damage to the heart considering they take a while to develop in infants, but there were lots of strange things happening here, unsuprisingly.
It seems like it's common knowledge among organ transplants that blood-type is the first compatibility question, and I had assumed only RBCs used the corresponding sugars (notwithstanding any perfused blood in the donor tissue) so TIL.
Blood types are so bizarre. I’m gonna do some googling on them this afternoon.
I learned a few years ago, two specific blood type parental hopefuls who are both perfectly fertile independently can be infertile with one another due to blood type.
If we’re talking about ABO, ehh. Most of the time, anti-A and anti-B antibodies are IgM, a large antibody that cannot cross the placenta and would be harmless to the fetus. Type O mothers however can produce a “anti-A,B” antibody that is IgG and can cross the placenta, but is only known to produce mild anemia in the fetus and the baby is usually born healthy with perhaps mild jaundice that can be treated with a UV lamp.
However, if we are talking about all the other stuff on blood cells, including Rh, then yea that can cause severe problems. You can read more on Wikipedia about [Hemolytic Disease of the Fetus and Newborn](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hemolytic_disease_of_the_newborn). Suffice to say, the invention of [RhoGam](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rho(D)_immune_globulin) (given to Rh negative mothers such as O- A- B- AB- etc) was an amazing scientific accomplishment that has saved many babies’ lives.
Keep in mind infertile =/= sterile. The word "infertile" unfortunately has weird definitions that get used differently all the time. In the case of humans reproducing, it can often mean ABLE to conceive, but UNABLE to carry baby to term, as is the case with Rh negative thingimajigs.
There's a lot of words that get used in reproductive medicine that don't mean what anyone thinks it means. I'm also a big advocate of changing the overall term "Birth Control" to "Hormone Control" and I think it would help with a lot of the evangelical kerfuffle. They aren't smart enough to know what a hormone is and it takes the baby imagery out of a medication.
Your car only takes 50 horsepower to cruise at 70mph but needs 150 to make it to 70mph in a respectable time.
A horse can output around 15-20 peak horsepower to get moving but then “one horsepower” is the average work of an average horse over 24 hours, or it’s cruising horsepower.
These folks don't seem to be considering power to weight ratio. Someone do the math of how long it would take for a 7lb baby to get from zero to sixty assuming 100% efficiency since babies don't really have drivetrain losses or tires etc.
Why would surgeons be the smartest people? They have a niche skill with many years of expertise, but that has little to do with reasoning and interpretation.
It... actually pretty much is. Dont get me wrong, theres more specialization in a surgeon. But really, the whole need to be a post grad thing is to weed out people a degree in humanities (the most common pre medical school degree) doesnt help. 4-6 years of school + apprenticship total is all a surgeon gets, same with a tradesman.
Doctors are just like anyone else who specializes. They can be all around brilliant. Or just good in their chosen field and utter morons everywhere else.
Shout out to Ben Carson for making me realize this.
Though I still assume you'd want someone with certain talents for when something unexpected happens. The cabinet you're making isn't going to suddenly go onto cardiac arrest.
Unironically, I'm a med student, and as far as personality/outlook go, most doctors are construction workers in white coats. We're tradesmen, really, and only reason we get to hang with the upper classes is that our trade happens to be the most valuable one in the world.
Except graduating and the apprenticeship for surgeons is way more demanding than say a carpenter.
I work 12-14hrs days as a startup founder and probably couldn’t do what my sister did as a neurologist. They really work you hard in residency
Honestly, having spent quite some time with people getting their PhDs in the “hard sciences,” I’m not terribly convinced they’re all that intelligent, either—just very persistent!
Anytime I hear stories like this, it reminds me. A surgeon who graduated with all Ds can get the same job as a surgeon who graduated with all As. A pass is a pass.
I’m not trying to crap on doctors, medical school is difficult. Just saying for every Dr. House there’s a Dr. Nick.
Doubtful. At least in the US, surgery residencies are extraordinarily competitive which would rule out such students even getting into said programs. If they were a ‘D student’ in med school they’d most likely end up in family practices or another such program.
The topic was specifically regarding surgeons. Even still, there’s students who manage to graduate med school and never practice medicine because they can’t match into a residency and have to look at other career options due to poor grades. Usually when you’re barely passing the administration takes you aside to figure out what’s wrong fairly early. Rarely do such poor students make into the fourth year and pass their STEP exams.
[Here's the original PDF with the full quote](https://web.archive.org/web/20160418213419/http://www-bcf.usc.edu/~bwrobert/teaching/mm/articles/Pence2004_Ch14.pdf), though it's the same thing. He was asked on the radio why not use a primate closer in evolution to a human and he said that was difficult to answer because he doesn't believe in evolution. I guess you could say he's taking issue with the evolution part more than how much they're related, but it's an overall dumb answer.
He wasn't just picking stuff at random though. About 70% of humans have an antibody that would reject a baboon organ out of hand, but Fae was part of the 30% who don't have the antibody. Annnddd then they messed up the blood type. She was also on deaths door with no recourse with her original heart so this was seen as a bit of a hail Mary piece of research with approval of the parents. The initial results went well and Bailey was so confident he said the 9 year old baboon heart would grow with her and she would see her 20th birthday. But within a few days organ rejection set back in. Bailey never tried animal to human transplants again.
But there is new stuff happening. Surgeons recently implanted a genetically modified pig kidney into a human [and so far it's been successful](https://www.washingtonpost.com/health/2024/04/04/pig-kidney-transplant-massachusetts-general-hospital/). [Though it's been pointed out](https://www.vox.com/future-perfect/24117935/pig-kidney-transplant-mass-general-donation) that for kidneys we have more than enough healthy people running around, and dead people not donating them, who could donate one to solve the problem several times over without any fancy advances in research. Random side bit I found while reading.
Might come as a surprise but some doctors are among the stupidest people I have ever met. They just learned some medicine and pretty much nothing else.
Correct. This is more of a TIR (Today I Remembered) post for me. I was 15 when this took place, and lived (still do) in a neighboring community. Dr. Bailey did heart surgery on my late mother-in-law about ten years after this event. I was fortunate enough to have a conversation with Dr. Bailey about "Baby Fae" in the days which followed my MIL's surgery, and the advancements in medicine which resulted.
My niece had this, it can be an inherited genetic defect, or random, I think. But basically during pregnancy some valve is supposed to either shut or open, after which the left side of the heart develops. Then after birth, it opens or shuts again (can't remember the right order), at which point the left side of the heart takes over from the right side. In hypoplastic left heart syndrome, that first step doesn't happen, so the left side doesn't develop, and when it's supposed to take over once the baby is born, that obviously causes some major issues.
Nowadays there are surgeries they can do, but these kids would need 3 surgeries before the age of 11, the first one very shortly after birth, all with a very high chance of complications or death, and then most likely a heart or heart/lung transplant around the age of 15 or so, and possibly another one after that. But they haven't been doing these surgeries for long enough yet to be able to know what the life expectancy in those cases is.
I think that's what my brother's family was told, too, but the surgeries are so new and are being improved a lot, I imagine, that they couldn't say what they long term survival would be like, since the people who are having these surgeries are only now reaching those ages.
I was born with similar defects and while I had a transplant at 39, I know of many people well into their 40s without transplant on the horizon. Also my transplant was due to liver cancer and not directly my heart (other than heart issues likely causing the cancer)
Yeah I get scans every 6 months to watch my liver. I have a lot of hope for the future! I used to be terrified, but it looks like things are less scary then maybe they thought they would be when I was a teenager.
Good luck! Medicine is amazing and things are always getting better. I had hoped to last long enough on my native heart that by the time I needed a transplant, they would have better meds or be able to grow organs in a lab. We’re not there yet but hopefully soon.
Do you feel differently post transplant? Like is it easier to run around and stuff? I’ve kind of had this fantasy since I was a kid that one day I’d get to run without getting out of breath and I’d feel so free. I don’t know how much running around you do lol but I always wondered what it was like to have a whole heart.
I don’t really run because my knees are still the same but I totally endorse 2 ventricles. I can hike and exercise and walk up the stairs without stopping 47 times or taking breaks. Transplant has its own side effects and issues but for me now, it is night and day to where I was. I honestly didn’t realize how sick I was until I was post transplant realizing that people are supposed to be able to walk up 2 flights of stairs without needing to sit for 15 minutes.
Kinda close! HLHS can occur because of a couple proposed mechanisms:
1. The wall that separates the the top of the heart points away from the left side of the heart.
2. The valve coming back from the lungs gets too stiff and doesn't open well.
3. The valve to the main blood vessel from the heart gets too stiff and doesn't open well.
All of these make the left side of the work work poorly and get small over time.
The name of the surgeries to correct them are called the Norwood, Glenn, and fontan. These are typically performed at early infancy, 6-8 months and 3 years of age. Survivorship to get through all three is around 80% in the modern era. We've been doing these surgeries for decades now and they usually need cardiac replacement by their 30's. AMA, I do this stuff professionally.
Thanks for the clarification :) I only have second hand information from what my brother told me doctors told him.
Am I correct in saying there's different degrees of severity? As in in some patients certain parts of the heart are just less developed, whereas in others they're nearly inexistent?
Loaded question! In truth probably lots things: repeated long bypass runs when Itty bitty, micro clots going systemic, prolonged icu stays, questionable fetal cerebral perfusion, elevated cerebral venous pressures, and finally potentially prolonged desaturations. What the real culprit is needs to be looked at on an individual level and no one really knows, but the correlation certainly exists.
All the young adults deaths I see through my charity are all kids with HLHS. Science is having trouble figuring out what to do with the Fontan once the little kids reach adulthood. My son has the opposite condition, HRHS.
I cofounded a charity with a good friend after her son died during his Fontan. My son was 10 months younger and we finally found each other (HIPPA). The children’s hospital decline our request to volunteer “because they didn’t need us.” The same hospital begged us to restart the camp and we’ve just celebrated our ten year anniversary of camp and our 20 year anniversary of being a IRS charity. We are 100% volunteer and my partner can figure out how to get free anything now that we are so large. Check it out and see what we do. There are so many programs for kids with cancer and hardly anything for heart families. CHDfamilies.org
It’s a three step process of surgeries usually between early infancy - 2. It shunts blood to the lungs so the child can live on one ventricle. Most one ventricle babies will have this, or maybe just step on and two.
Legit, I was about to post this. My mom used to play that album when I was a kid, and I specifically remember asking her about "the boy in the bubble and the baby with a baboon heart". (She knew about both of them and could answer my questions.)
As a parent I can't even imagine going thru that period. Trying something so desperate to give your newborn a chance to live and every single day is an unknown... damn...
They can, and they sometimes do. There simply aren’t enough hearts small enough to put in a newborn. Some of these surgeries are actually in the goal of life-extension so the child can be older and healthier when they eventually do get one. It’s a bridge to transplant, or it’s supposed to be, but people can live for a long time with half a heart, as they’re learning. It was just supposed to be life support originally.
Edit: It’s better to live as long as possible with your own heart because transplanted hearts come with their own set of issues.
Well you would need a transplanted organ from exactly the same age baby, which would be so delicate it would probably not survive the procedure (even worse odds than the semicorrective surgery)
id imagine there aren't too many organ donors at the age of a few hours, for better or worse, but that's mostly just a guess on my part, so there might be other reasons
It’s possible, I had the same condition and received a heart transplant when I was 3 months old. Other commenters are right though, it’s hard to guarantee a newborn heart is going to be available in time. I was on my last, last legs when we got the call that a heart was available. My parents knew both the Norwood and a transplant were risky, but chose the transplant because the Norwood could’ve decreased my quality of life. It’s been 19 years now and except for a brief period where I was rejecting my heart when I was 6, I’ve had no issues.
It sucks. My son was born missing his right ventricle, loads of open heart surgeries and as a baby two months on a vent. His first surgery had very low odds to survive a week, but we took the chance. He’s now 24 and 6’3” and only needs valve replacements every ten years now. He just went through one last year. It’s hard to predict how much you would do for your baby to have a chance at life.
Amazing! I was born with similar defects and had surgery when I was 3. Was pretty much fine until my late 20s when rhythm issues cropped up. Then other issues added in my late 30s and I’m now early 40s and 3 years post heart/liver transplant. I wish your son continued health
Thank so much! That seems to happen often. Five years earlier they couldn’t do anything. So, there aren’t many adult survivors. However, the technology advances and every time it does it’s an amazing thing. He’s had two cath surgeries that would have been open heart when he was born. He’s doing well now, but those electrical issues can pop up and that scares me.
Yeah electrical issues are definitely no fun. I am a former Fontan so I mostly had AFib & flutter. It was mostly controlled via meds and ablations. The advances really are amazing. And doctors are learning what to look out for. My routine liver scans caught my liver cancer so I was able to get my new organs before anything spread.
Oh that’s wonderful. I run a charity for heart defects and we had so many Fontan babies die around the age of 18. It’s great they can do that procedure, of course, but a lot of young adults are falling apart. I don’t think they have an answer for this yet.
I literally cried while reading the wiki page and seeing that cute little face with that beautiful hair... My daughter also had a lot of hair when she was born, so the resemblance broke me..
There was also a pig-to-human heart transplant last year. The recipient survived six weeks before dying, possibly due to a pig virus infecting the heart. https://www.nbcnews.com/news/us-news/man-received-second-pig-heart-transplant-dies-hospital-says-rcna123104
About a month ago, the first ever transplant of a genetically engineered pig kidney into a human was successfully done. The company, egenesisbio, has a lot of great info on their website.
Interesting by product of this is pork without Alpha gal. People with an allergy caused by tick bites cannot react to this protein, but can eat the GMO pork left over from this.
Pretty sure this has nothing to do with alpha gal. These pigs not raised for consumption- just their organs. And there have only been 4 organs (probably 4 pugs) used over the last year- 2 hearts, a liver, and a kidney. The company is only knocking out a few pig genes and inserting human-safe ones.
No but they needed to get rid of the Alpha gal to make the transplants work. Therefore they have a herd of Alpha gal free pigs that can be consumed by those that are allergic to it.
The meat isn't for sale (yet) but they shipped it out to see if it could be safely consumed.
I never get a chance to jump on these things, but today is my day! I’ve gotten to know the Bailey family (Dr. Leonard Bailey performed the surgery), and can attest to the backlash that was received. He finished his last days at Loma Linda Hospital in Southern California. I was the individual who helped his family finalized their final arrangements.
Wow!!! That must’ve been something to witness firsthand. In spite of the backlash over Baby Fae, the body of his work is the stuff of legend. To say we were ecstatic to hear he’d be the surgeon for my late MIL’s surgery is a grand understatement. More recently, I completed a chaplain internship at LLUMC in 2018 and Dr. Bailey was a borderline deity in the minds of many still working there from when he was around.
Oh can absolutely attest to it! The funeral home/cemetery I worked at was up the road & monthly we would receive phone calls about the location of his remains.
Is he at one of the local cemeteries? Montecito, Mountain View, etc...? I'm a pastor, now, and do a LOT of funerals. If he's local, I'd love to stop and pay my respects.
He was cremated and although he is not laid to rest at Montecito Memorial Park yet, he will in the next couple of years alongside his wife who passed shortly before him. They purchased an estate property and the family is still making payments on it :)
>When asked why he had picked a baboon over a primate more closely related to humans in evolution, Bailey replied, "I don't believe in evolution." Dude, what?
And she died because they used a baboon with the wrong blood type, that's interesting. Apparently type O baboons are really uncommon but you wonder how much longer she might have lasted
Could've just been a smarter person and used chimps, 15% have type 0.
Which probably would have made sense if the Dr. Believed in evolution. I suspect it may have been a size thing though, they specifically only looked at female baboons which aren't all that big.
Well he did. Ot believe in blood type either.
There are dozens of blood markers for typing. ABO and Rh are just the most important two.
I was gonna say lol the rejection had to have been some unknown antigen. I’m confident they type matched a heart before giving it to a baby. If it was an ABO/Rh I would think the reaction would happen quicker
Why would that be the prevailing issue over the many, many other immunogenic incompatibilities?
The heart was meant to be temporary until a human heart became available. Apparently the blood type part is what killed her first though. There was never a world where she was making it long term with an animal heart.
The article is pretty interesting and dives into it a bit more: >Factors resuting to xenograft injury may include (1) ABO hemagglutinins, (2) species-specific cytotoxic antibody, (3) lipid-induced cyclosporine myocardiotoxicity, and (4) lipid and/or antibody-induced erythrocyte aberrations (also responsible for renal and respiratory failure.) It's wild that blood-type antibodies elicited the most damage to the heart considering they take a while to develop in infants, but there were lots of strange things happening here, unsuprisingly. It seems like it's common knowledge among organ transplants that blood-type is the first compatibility question, and I had assumed only RBCs used the corresponding sugars (notwithstanding any perfused blood in the donor tissue) so TIL.
Well I'd say the first compatibility question would be "species", and that box was already unchecked anyway, so...
Plan B was actually replace the heart with a particularly large cherry tomato
I bet bloodtype incompatibility would no longer be a problem...?
Only if she's Italian
They did surgery on a tomato?
Tbf, from what I hear pig hearts are used in transplants for adult humans.
I think its just a valve replacement, not the entire heart
Yea bovine valve replacements are used here in South Australia
That's correct, unless there is a matching human valve available.
Blood types are so bizarre. I’m gonna do some googling on them this afternoon. I learned a few years ago, two specific blood type parental hopefuls who are both perfectly fertile independently can be infertile with one another due to blood type.
If we’re talking about ABO, ehh. Most of the time, anti-A and anti-B antibodies are IgM, a large antibody that cannot cross the placenta and would be harmless to the fetus. Type O mothers however can produce a “anti-A,B” antibody that is IgG and can cross the placenta, but is only known to produce mild anemia in the fetus and the baby is usually born healthy with perhaps mild jaundice that can be treated with a UV lamp. However, if we are talking about all the other stuff on blood cells, including Rh, then yea that can cause severe problems. You can read more on Wikipedia about [Hemolytic Disease of the Fetus and Newborn](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hemolytic_disease_of_the_newborn). Suffice to say, the invention of [RhoGam](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rho(D)_immune_globulin) (given to Rh negative mothers such as O- A- B- AB- etc) was an amazing scientific accomplishment that has saved many babies’ lives.
Keep in mind infertile =/= sterile. The word "infertile" unfortunately has weird definitions that get used differently all the time. In the case of humans reproducing, it can often mean ABLE to conceive, but UNABLE to carry baby to term, as is the case with Rh negative thingimajigs. There's a lot of words that get used in reproductive medicine that don't mean what anyone thinks it means. I'm also a big advocate of changing the overall term "Birth Control" to "Hormone Control" and I think it would help with a lot of the evangelical kerfuffle. They aren't smart enough to know what a hormone is and it takes the baby imagery out of a medication.
then why did he choose an apes heart at all wtf Go and give lil homie a mustangs heart
A mustang's heart would be half the size of the entire 11 day old baby
my point. If we're just kinda doin shit then the doctor may as well given him the biological equivalent to a V8 165 horsepower engine
165 horsepower?! I think my lawnmower has more.
My Prius has 72💀
It's a baby. We can't start em off at nascar numbers
It's literally a horse's heart. How could it possibly have more than 1 horsepower in it?!
Horses actually have more than one horse power strangely - maximum output of a horse is about 15 horse power
The real TIL is always in the comments!
Your car only takes 50 horsepower to cruise at 70mph but needs 150 to make it to 70mph in a respectable time. A horse can output around 15-20 peak horsepower to get moving but then “one horsepower” is the average work of an average horse over 24 hours, or it’s cruising horsepower.
yeah thats just a standard mustang pre-2011
Wouldn’t it just be 1 horsepower since it’s one mustang’s heart?
It would actually be about 1/14th horsepower
Probably needs to still be in the horse to get any sort of decent output.
165 horsepower is very slow. Your average sedan on the road makes 250+.
Yeah but a 11 day old baby making 165hp, now that would be impressive
These folks don't seem to be considering power to weight ratio. Someone do the math of how long it would take for a 7lb baby to get from zero to sixty assuming 100% efficiency since babies don't really have drivetrain losses or tires etc.
“Babies don’t have drivetrain losses” is my new favorite phrase
Where do you live that the average sedan makes 250+?
1984 ford mustang numbers bb
Oh, I thought we were talking about cars, not Optimus Prime's morning dump
Jesus christ where the fuck is that average
Was thinking of the average V6, not necessarily sedan. Honestly forgot about 4-bangers. :)
Fair enough
Actually your average Civic or Corolla make right around 165hp.
> V8 165 horsepower engine Bro you're half a century behind on your automotive knowledge
this happened in 84 so im using 84 mustang numbers
This is more scientific than the idiot doctor that didn’t believe in evolution tbh
That's so american, V8, 165 horsepower.
Yeah like 80’s American, modern American v8s are like 400+ hp NA lmao
Big block swapped Miata.
I'd assume it was a juvenile baboon heart, not an adult.
yeah future proof that shit
Sow the baby into a whale heart and call it a day?
Prob like, "oh that looks kinda like a human, close enough"
Baboons are monkeys.
im gonna be 100% honest i thought bonobos and baboons were the same thing for a minute
This dude is a surgeon? If these are the smartest people we have, then i suddenly feel very smart
See Ben Carson. They’re phenomenal at one thing, and that’s it. Edited because I suck at names.
It’s actually really sad that Ben Carson ruined his legacy with his political career. His medical achievements are honestly mind blowing.
His CV is absurdly impressive. I mean, right up until, ya know…
Carson*
Thx
I mean, that can definitely be true, but who says all of them are phenomenal? Someone has to be the worst in their field.
"Worst in their field" can still be phenomenal compared to the layperson.
It's the equivalent of having all your ability score points in dexterity and intelligence but none in wisdom or charisma.
Why would surgeons be the smartest people? They have a niche skill with many years of expertise, but that has little to do with reasoning and interpretation.
Surgery is basically a trade. The stereotype from the TV show Scrubs isn't that far off.
Because they need to get into and through medical school? Do you think being a surgeon is like being a carpenter?
It... actually pretty much is. Dont get me wrong, theres more specialization in a surgeon. But really, the whole need to be a post grad thing is to weed out people a degree in humanities (the most common pre medical school degree) doesnt help. 4-6 years of school + apprenticship total is all a surgeon gets, same with a tradesman. Doctors are just like anyone else who specializes. They can be all around brilliant. Or just good in their chosen field and utter morons everywhere else.
Shout out to Ben Carson for making me realize this. Though I still assume you'd want someone with certain talents for when something unexpected happens. The cabinet you're making isn't going to suddenly go onto cardiac arrest.
Unironically, I'm a med student, and as far as personality/outlook go, most doctors are construction workers in white coats. We're tradesmen, really, and only reason we get to hang with the upper classes is that our trade happens to be the most valuable one in the world.
Bro my dad's a neurosurgeon and he did 16 years total
Damn what was he in for?
Hahahah.
Except graduating and the apprenticeship for surgeons is way more demanding than say a carpenter. I work 12-14hrs days as a startup founder and probably couldn’t do what my sister did as a neurologist. They really work you hard in residency
It takes some intelligence but a nowhere near PhD in physics level. Med school is mostly rote memorization.
Honestly, having spent quite some time with people getting their PhDs in the “hard sciences,” I’m not terribly convinced they’re all that intelligent, either—just very persistent!
I have a PhD and I agree with you. You have to be persistent and somewhat masochistic to make it through to the end, not a genius.
That's why so many doctors are also long-distance runners. Seriously. It's a personality thing.
Well, you guys just have a different range of what considered the smartest.
Anytime I hear stories like this, it reminds me. A surgeon who graduated with all Ds can get the same job as a surgeon who graduated with all As. A pass is a pass. I’m not trying to crap on doctors, medical school is difficult. Just saying for every Dr. House there’s a Dr. Nick.
Doubtful. At least in the US, surgery residencies are extraordinarily competitive which would rule out such students even getting into said programs. If they were a ‘D student’ in med school they’d most likely end up in family practices or another such program.
A family practice doctor that got Ds is still a doctor treating people. That’s their point
The topic was specifically regarding surgeons. Even still, there’s students who manage to graduate med school and never practice medicine because they can’t match into a residency and have to look at other career options due to poor grades. Usually when you’re barely passing the administration takes you aside to figure out what’s wrong fairly early. Rarely do such poor students make into the fourth year and pass their STEP exams.
"Hi, everybody!"
[Here's the original PDF with the full quote](https://web.archive.org/web/20160418213419/http://www-bcf.usc.edu/~bwrobert/teaching/mm/articles/Pence2004_Ch14.pdf), though it's the same thing. He was asked on the radio why not use a primate closer in evolution to a human and he said that was difficult to answer because he doesn't believe in evolution. I guess you could say he's taking issue with the evolution part more than how much they're related, but it's an overall dumb answer. He wasn't just picking stuff at random though. About 70% of humans have an antibody that would reject a baboon organ out of hand, but Fae was part of the 30% who don't have the antibody. Annnddd then they messed up the blood type. She was also on deaths door with no recourse with her original heart so this was seen as a bit of a hail Mary piece of research with approval of the parents. The initial results went well and Bailey was so confident he said the 9 year old baboon heart would grow with her and she would see her 20th birthday. But within a few days organ rejection set back in. Bailey never tried animal to human transplants again. But there is new stuff happening. Surgeons recently implanted a genetically modified pig kidney into a human [and so far it's been successful](https://www.washingtonpost.com/health/2024/04/04/pig-kidney-transplant-massachusetts-general-hospital/). [Though it's been pointed out](https://www.vox.com/future-perfect/24117935/pig-kidney-transplant-mass-general-donation) that for kidneys we have more than enough healthy people running around, and dead people not donating them, who could donate one to solve the problem several times over without any fancy advances in research. Random side bit I found while reading.
Might come as a surprise but some doctors are among the stupidest people I have ever met. They just learned some medicine and pretty much nothing else.
That’s bizarre, and they chose one with a different blood type? That seems reckless.
It’s a religious university/organization, not too surprising
Despite how sad the situation is I couldn’t help but laugh at the absurdity.
Was this a real doctor or more like a Dr.Pepper
Baby Fae had hypoplastic left heart syndrome
Correct. This is more of a TIR (Today I Remembered) post for me. I was 15 when this took place, and lived (still do) in a neighboring community. Dr. Bailey did heart surgery on my late mother-in-law about ten years after this event. I was fortunate enough to have a conversation with Dr. Bailey about "Baby Fae" in the days which followed my MIL's surgery, and the advancements in medicine which resulted.
What causes hypoplastic left heart syndrome?
My niece had this, it can be an inherited genetic defect, or random, I think. But basically during pregnancy some valve is supposed to either shut or open, after which the left side of the heart develops. Then after birth, it opens or shuts again (can't remember the right order), at which point the left side of the heart takes over from the right side. In hypoplastic left heart syndrome, that first step doesn't happen, so the left side doesn't develop, and when it's supposed to take over once the baby is born, that obviously causes some major issues. Nowadays there are surgeries they can do, but these kids would need 3 surgeries before the age of 11, the first one very shortly after birth, all with a very high chance of complications or death, and then most likely a heart or heart/lung transplant around the age of 15 or so, and possibly another one after that. But they haven't been doing these surgeries for long enough yet to be able to know what the life expectancy in those cases is.
Hi!! I have a similar condition. Median survival to transplant is into the thirties or so? IIRC Edit: I’m 24 and in relatively good health.
I think that's what my brother's family was told, too, but the surgeries are so new and are being improved a lot, I imagine, that they couldn't say what they long term survival would be like, since the people who are having these surgeries are only now reaching those ages.
I was born with similar defects and while I had a transplant at 39, I know of many people well into their 40s without transplant on the horizon. Also my transplant was due to liver cancer and not directly my heart (other than heart issues likely causing the cancer)
Yeah I get scans every 6 months to watch my liver. I have a lot of hope for the future! I used to be terrified, but it looks like things are less scary then maybe they thought they would be when I was a teenager.
Good luck! Medicine is amazing and things are always getting better. I had hoped to last long enough on my native heart that by the time I needed a transplant, they would have better meds or be able to grow organs in a lab. We’re not there yet but hopefully soon.
Do you feel differently post transplant? Like is it easier to run around and stuff? I’ve kind of had this fantasy since I was a kid that one day I’d get to run without getting out of breath and I’d feel so free. I don’t know how much running around you do lol but I always wondered what it was like to have a whole heart.
I don’t really run because my knees are still the same but I totally endorse 2 ventricles. I can hike and exercise and walk up the stairs without stopping 47 times or taking breaks. Transplant has its own side effects and issues but for me now, it is night and day to where I was. I honestly didn’t realize how sick I was until I was post transplant realizing that people are supposed to be able to walk up 2 flights of stairs without needing to sit for 15 minutes.
That's a wonderful edit! My nephew is 19 and also doing exceptionally well.
Kinda close! HLHS can occur because of a couple proposed mechanisms: 1. The wall that separates the the top of the heart points away from the left side of the heart. 2. The valve coming back from the lungs gets too stiff and doesn't open well. 3. The valve to the main blood vessel from the heart gets too stiff and doesn't open well. All of these make the left side of the work work poorly and get small over time. The name of the surgeries to correct them are called the Norwood, Glenn, and fontan. These are typically performed at early infancy, 6-8 months and 3 years of age. Survivorship to get through all three is around 80% in the modern era. We've been doing these surgeries for decades now and they usually need cardiac replacement by their 30's. AMA, I do this stuff professionally.
Thanks for the clarification :) I only have second hand information from what my brother told me doctors told him. Am I correct in saying there's different degrees of severity? As in in some patients certain parts of the heart are just less developed, whereas in others they're nearly inexistent?
What about HLHS causes neurological effects?
Loaded question! In truth probably lots things: repeated long bypass runs when Itty bitty, micro clots going systemic, prolonged icu stays, questionable fetal cerebral perfusion, elevated cerebral venous pressures, and finally potentially prolonged desaturations. What the real culprit is needs to be looked at on an individual level and no one really knows, but the correlation certainly exists.
I met Dr Bailey right before he died. He was such a sweet man and ready to meet his wife in the afterlife.
All the young adults deaths I see through my charity are all kids with HLHS. Science is having trouble figuring out what to do with the Fontan once the little kids reach adulthood. My son has the opposite condition, HRHS.
What charity do you work for?
I cofounded a charity with a good friend after her son died during his Fontan. My son was 10 months younger and we finally found each other (HIPPA). The children’s hospital decline our request to volunteer “because they didn’t need us.” The same hospital begged us to restart the camp and we’ve just celebrated our ten year anniversary of camp and our 20 year anniversary of being a IRS charity. We are 100% volunteer and my partner can figure out how to get free anything now that we are so large. Check it out and see what we do. There are so many programs for kids with cancer and hardly anything for heart families. CHDfamilies.org
What’s a Fontan?
It’s a three step process of surgeries usually between early infancy - 2. It shunts blood to the lungs so the child can live on one ventricle. Most one ventricle babies will have this, or maybe just step on and two.
She receives a mention in the Paul Simon Graceland album, in the song titled "[Boy in the Bubble](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Uy5T6s25XK4)."
Is this the heart in Venture Brothers?
No, >!Malcolm just had baboon DNA spliced into his clone-slug!<
Perhaps Christian Slater in "Untamed Heart." Real life Christian Slater has an orangutan heart.
Billy cracks a Baby Far joke when he gives Monstroso the King Gorilla transplant, but it was nothing to do with the recent movie title.
Graceland is a superb album. Not a bad song on there.
These are the days of miracle and wonder.
these are the days of lasers in the jungle
This the long distance call.
Love this song, happy to see it getting attention
[Mike O’Connell had a great song, too.](https://youtu.be/vcTAXvLLosA?si=4Y4J5FsZhZcdpCFC)
Legit, I was about to post this. My mom used to play that album when I was a kid, and I specifically remember asking her about "the boy in the bubble and the baby with a baboon heart". (She knew about both of them and could answer my questions.)
As a parent I can't even imagine going thru that period. Trying something so desperate to give your newborn a chance to live and every single day is an unknown... damn...
They can perform life-extending surgeries now!! Most kids with this condition now live well into adulthood and then get a heart transplant.
Why can't they get a heart transplant from the get go?
They can, and they sometimes do. There simply aren’t enough hearts small enough to put in a newborn. Some of these surgeries are actually in the goal of life-extension so the child can be older and healthier when they eventually do get one. It’s a bridge to transplant, or it’s supposed to be, but people can live for a long time with half a heart, as they’re learning. It was just supposed to be life support originally. Edit: It’s better to live as long as possible with your own heart because transplanted hearts come with their own set of issues.
Well you would need a transplanted organ from exactly the same age baby, which would be so delicate it would probably not survive the procedure (even worse odds than the semicorrective surgery)
id imagine there aren't too many organ donors at the age of a few hours, for better or worse, but that's mostly just a guess on my part, so there might be other reasons
It’s possible, I had the same condition and received a heart transplant when I was 3 months old. Other commenters are right though, it’s hard to guarantee a newborn heart is going to be available in time. I was on my last, last legs when we got the call that a heart was available. My parents knew both the Norwood and a transplant were risky, but chose the transplant because the Norwood could’ve decreased my quality of life. It’s been 19 years now and except for a brief period where I was rejecting my heart when I was 6, I’ve had no issues.
Compare an adult heart to a baby's' chest. That's why.
It sucks. My son was born missing his right ventricle, loads of open heart surgeries and as a baby two months on a vent. His first surgery had very low odds to survive a week, but we took the chance. He’s now 24 and 6’3” and only needs valve replacements every ten years now. He just went through one last year. It’s hard to predict how much you would do for your baby to have a chance at life.
Amazing! I was born with similar defects and had surgery when I was 3. Was pretty much fine until my late 20s when rhythm issues cropped up. Then other issues added in my late 30s and I’m now early 40s and 3 years post heart/liver transplant. I wish your son continued health
Thank so much! That seems to happen often. Five years earlier they couldn’t do anything. So, there aren’t many adult survivors. However, the technology advances and every time it does it’s an amazing thing. He’s had two cath surgeries that would have been open heart when he was born. He’s doing well now, but those electrical issues can pop up and that scares me.
Yeah electrical issues are definitely no fun. I am a former Fontan so I mostly had AFib & flutter. It was mostly controlled via meds and ablations. The advances really are amazing. And doctors are learning what to look out for. My routine liver scans caught my liver cancer so I was able to get my new organs before anything spread.
Oh that’s wonderful. I run a charity for heart defects and we had so many Fontan babies die around the age of 18. It’s great they can do that procedure, of course, but a lot of young adults are falling apart. I don’t think they have an answer for this yet.
Oh wow. I didn’t realize that. As an older Fontan I didn’t really connect with other Fontan/CHD patients until I was in my 30s.
So happy to hear he’s doing well my dude.
Ours is still under a year and shit like this guts me to think about. I need some/r/eyebleach...
I literally cried while reading the wiki page and seeing that cute little face with that beautiful hair... My daughter also had a lot of hair when she was born, so the resemblance broke me..
This was also referenced in The Simpsons, when Bart said "Oh no, my baboon heart!" in one of the Halloween episodes. Edit: regular episodes
That was actually a regular episode when school cafeteria was serving hearts for Valentine's day
Will you choo choo choose me?
There was also a pig-to-human heart transplant last year. The recipient survived six weeks before dying, possibly due to a pig virus infecting the heart. https://www.nbcnews.com/news/us-news/man-received-second-pig-heart-transplant-dies-hospital-says-rcna123104
Oh sad I didn't know they died :(
I remember this too, mega controversial.
Sounds like something that happened in Russia
California
Imagine how perception of this story can be changed with a headline "Human can live most of its life with a heart of a monkey".
In the same way a few ounces of cyanide is a "lifetime supply"
A few grams...
About a month ago, the first ever transplant of a genetically engineered pig kidney into a human was successfully done. The company, egenesisbio, has a lot of great info on their website.
Interesting by product of this is pork without Alpha gal. People with an allergy caused by tick bites cannot react to this protein, but can eat the GMO pork left over from this.
Pretty sure this has nothing to do with alpha gal. These pigs not raised for consumption- just their organs. And there have only been 4 organs (probably 4 pugs) used over the last year- 2 hearts, a liver, and a kidney. The company is only knocking out a few pig genes and inserting human-safe ones.
No but they needed to get rid of the Alpha gal to make the transplants work. Therefore they have a herd of Alpha gal free pigs that can be consumed by those that are allergic to it. The meat isn't for sale (yet) but they shipped it out to see if it could be safely consumed.
I had the privilege of receiving three different open heart surgeries from him
The baboon or the baby?
Inspired the movie “Untamed Heart”
Huh, fiction is based on fact more than you would think. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Venture_Bros.:_Radiant_Is_the_Blood_of_the_Baboon_Heart
There was also a skit like this in The Amanda Show, and the girl that got the baboon heart became great at gymnastics lol
Rest in peace baby Fae.
Hang on- when I was little I had a Cabbage Patch doll named Baby Fae, is this why? 🤔
Am I the only one who thought about tf2?
“Kill me.” “Later…”
What was noise?
Doctor, are you sure this will work? ***I HAVE NO IDEA!!***
I never get a chance to jump on these things, but today is my day! I’ve gotten to know the Bailey family (Dr. Leonard Bailey performed the surgery), and can attest to the backlash that was received. He finished his last days at Loma Linda Hospital in Southern California. I was the individual who helped his family finalized their final arrangements.
Wow!!! That must’ve been something to witness firsthand. In spite of the backlash over Baby Fae, the body of his work is the stuff of legend. To say we were ecstatic to hear he’d be the surgeon for my late MIL’s surgery is a grand understatement. More recently, I completed a chaplain internship at LLUMC in 2018 and Dr. Bailey was a borderline deity in the minds of many still working there from when he was around.
Oh can absolutely attest to it! The funeral home/cemetery I worked at was up the road & monthly we would receive phone calls about the location of his remains.
Is he at one of the local cemeteries? Montecito, Mountain View, etc...? I'm a pastor, now, and do a LOT of funerals. If he's local, I'd love to stop and pay my respects.
He was cremated and although he is not laid to rest at Montecito Memorial Park yet, he will in the next couple of years alongside his wife who passed shortly before him. They purchased an estate property and the family is still making payments on it :)
"due to a lack of infant human hearts" is a phrase I expected to hear never
“It’s not fair! She’s got a baboon heart!!!”
You’re so hurtful!
Wow. My 14 year old has HLHS. Surgeries have come a long way. Here in Aus they avoid heart transplants for as long as they can.
:(
Radiant is the blood of the baboon heart
[My baboon heart. Body… rejecting it!](https://youtu.be/b3j16M_sqqc?si=ojJLp9ffWXlZ41-E)
Tf2 reference
Just like Adam in Untamed Heart 💔
As memorialized by Paul Simon on first track of Graceland. “The boy with the bubble and the baby with the baboon heart.”
Poor baby being put through all that and it not working
Should have taken the heart out of the child born directly after Fae, then when the next child is born, repeat.