ADD HUMAN GUINNEA-PIGS
Part 1 / Part 2That the questionable experimentation on human beings, preferably babies and other subjects as powerless as laboratory animals is constantly increasing was indicated on page 84 (of NAKED EMPRESS or The Great Medical Fraud) and following.
This increase, not only in numbers but also in horror, reached a new climax - for the time being - in 1984 with the cases of Hollie Roffey in Great Britain and Baby Fae in the USA.
An Associated Press story in the International Herald Tribune of August 18/19, 1984, titled "British Baby Dies After Transplant", ran in full:
Hollie Roffey, the baby who became the world's youngest heart transplant patient when she received a new heart July 30 at the age of 10 days, died Friday, the National Heart Hospital said. At her death, she was 28 days old. The infant developed respiratory problems and died soon afterwards, the hospital said.
Hollie was born with the left side of her heart missing. Before she was given the heart of a Dutch baby who died of brain damage, the previous youngest transplant patient had been a two-and-a-half week old infant who died soon after surgery in 1967 in Brooklyn, New York.
Two days after the transplant, Hollie underwent surgery to seal a perforated intestine. Then bowel and kidney problems developed. On August 9, she suffered kidney failure and was put on renal dialysis."
The London Times announcing the event was sharply critical, with an extensive article titled "Hollie: an experiment too soon", by Thomas Stuttaford, who pointed out that one doesn't even know what doses of immunosuppressive drugs can safely be administered to such a small child.
Even Christiaan Barnard seemed delighted to be for once on the giving rather than the receiving end of criticism, judging by an UPI press release in the International Herald Tribune of August 16, 1984:
Doctors made a ''serious mistake'' by giving a new heart to Hollie Roffey, according to the surgeon who performed the world's first successful heart transplant.
Dr. Christiaan Barnard said the operation at London's National Heart Hospital on July 30 when the child was 10 days old, leaves "too many unanswered questions... Nobody knows whether Hollie's heart will grow as she does; nobody could guess at her chances of survival," said Dr. Barnard.
Believe it or not: just a few weeks later, blithely ignoring all experienced critics, logical considerations, anatomical idiosyncrasies, biological differences, metabolic evidence, and the solid record of failures, American surgeons decided to attempt an even more unnatural transplant on a 12-day-old baby born with a similar defect as Hollie, using a new, far riskier twist.
On October 26, 1984, at California's Loma Linda University Medical Center, a baby girl dubbed Baby Fae, whose parents desired anonymity, was submitted to an unprecedented laboratory ordeal: her defective heart (hypoplastic left-heart syndrome) was replaced with the heart of a young female baboon, for an experiment that in scientific lingo reads "cross-species transplant research."
From the outset, experienced surgeons expressed doubts about the wisdom of such an operation, as indicated in Time Magazine, November 12, 1984:
"There has never been a successful cross-species transplant," declared University of Minnesota Surgeon John Najarian, one of the country's leading pediatric-transplant specialists. "To try it now is merely to prolong the dying process."
Dr. Moneim Fadali, a cardiovascular surgeon at the University of California, Los Angeles, was one of several physicians to suggest that the decision to use an animal organ may have been "a matter of bravado."
In fact, one doesn't have to be a pediatric-transplant specialist to realize that the Baby Fae adventure. was bound to fail. Elementary biological notions, or just sound common sense - that most uncommon of all qualities as far as medical matters are concerned - should suffice.
Poor Baby Fae, born with a partially missing heart, was close to meeting her natural end when she was pulled back to increased, prolonged suffering through high-tech interventions which didn't take into account what had happened to Hollie Roffey shortly before and what had been clearly explained by real medical authorities like Dr. H.M. Pappworth in Human Guinea Pigs as far back as 1969 (see Slaughter of the Innocent, pp. 22 and 354/355).
But there was more and worse. Baboons have only two major arteries leaving the aortic arch, as opposed to the three in humans; that means that two of Baby Fae's vessels had first to be joined together before being connected to one of the two arterial openings in the baboon's heart, thus adding new and complex difficulties to the already questionable surgical venture.
Now, what were the qualifications of Dr. Leonard L. Bailey, the surgeon who had conceived of this hair-brained experiment? He had previously performed cross-species heart transplants on more than 300 goats, sheep and baboons, with a survival rate of ZERO. His best performance: a goat that had survived 165 days with a lamb's heart.
But like Dr. Christiaan Barnard, who was not deterred by a long string of failed heart-transplant experiments on dogs before applying them, with comparable results, to humans, Dr. Bailey also had not allowed constant failure to go to his head and had boldly decided to extend his disastrous experiences to human beings, starting with Baby Fae.
The experimental operation on the defenseless baby girl stood no chance of succeeding. Not only were the rejection problems far more serious, actually forbidding, in a cross-species transplant, but there was no reason to believe that the young baboon's heart would grow exactly apace with the recipient's growth. The comparatively shorter-lived and eventually smaller sized baboons grow to adulthood much faster than humans - in fact, within a year, and so do all their organs, including the heart. It was a case of wild, headless experimentation, which some people might even regard as criminal, or at least idiotic.