ADD HUMAN GUINNEA PIGS
Part 1 / Part 2However, the press hastened to present this latest experimental folly as a new "breakthrough", glossing over the previous medical "break-throughs" that had all sooner or later ended in breakdowns.
Wrote Lawrence K. Altman, a medical doctor, in a Special to the New York Times, datelined October 29, barely three days after the operation, under the headline 'Doctors Say Baby With Baboon Heart Is Doing 'Remarkably Well':
The doctors said that the 17-day-old infant had good color and was breathing easily without the aid of a mechanical respirator to which she had been attached for almost a week.
This was a wrong bit of information, as it turned out before very long. But a week later, in the New York Times of November 6, the same Dr. Lawrence K. Altman hyperbolized, without laughing:
With every beat the thriving infant makes history as the longest surviving human recipient of a transplanted animal heart.
Hers is one of the most exciting and potentially important medical stories in recent times. Dr. Leonard L. Bailey, the surgeon who heads the team that did the bold experiment, said, "We know more about newborn heart transplant surgery and immunology than anyone on the globe right now."And Time Magazine of November 12:
By week's end Baby Fae's remarkable progress was making many critics of the experiment think again.
In the same issue of Time, the whipped-cream topping from fallen 'wunderkind' Dr. Christiaan Barnard: Having disapproved of the Hollie Roffey venture just a few weeks earlier, the noted philosopher and surgeon had unaccountably undergone a change of mind, and came all out in favor of the even more questionable Loma Linda implant:
Barnard is nonetheless enthusiastic about the Baby Fae case and has no qualms about the use of baboons, which, he says, are shot on sight by South African farmers, who consider them a nuisance... "Maybe one of these days we can start farming baboons for this purpose."
Meanwhile the incident was growing more grotesque each day. The doctors performed tests on every organ of the experimental baby, including the baboon heart. At the same time they tried to duplicate what was taking place inside the infant's body by transplanting hearts in baby baboons with abandon and administering the same drugs she was receiving - having perhaps never heard that animals react in a very different way to drugs than humans, and in many cases monkeys act more differently from humans than other animal species do. But it all helped to fool the public at large into accepting those jolly gamesters as "scientists" engaged in serious, life-saving "research."
There is little doubt that while science writers, medical commentators, editorialists, philosophers, and Christiaan Barnard himself were having a field day discussing the Baby Fae case, the five-pound bundle of bleeding flesh and bones - fed intravenously, stuck with needles, prodded by rubber gloves, studded with stitches, bearing cannulas, filled with chemicals, hitched to respirators, submitted to dialysis, exposed to Roentgen rays - was suffering torments such as in our civilization only laboratory animals are usually made to endure.
That much began to transpire from later reports, contradicting the earlier, far more sanguine news releases. The Medical Center's spokeswoman June Ochs revealed to the New York Post of November 16 that the baby was still on a respirator and intravenous feeding 22 days after the operation, and in a weekly resume' the same paper gave the following account of Monday, November 12, three days before Baby Fae's death:
'The baby's efforts to reject the baboon heart are more intense than first thought. Doctors give Baby Fae a heart stimulant and add another anti-rejection drug - lymphocyte immune globulin - to cyclosporine and steroid hormone doses. Bottle feedings are halted, intravenous feedings resume and the baby is returned to a respirator to conserve her strength."
The doctors' and copywriters' embarrassed hangover began 20½ days after the operation, when Baby Fae was finally allowed to find her eternal peace. The report in the New York Post of November 16, quoting Ed Wines, a hospital spokesman, went like this:
Baby Fae died at 9 p.m. The five-pound infant had been listed in serious but stable condition earlier in the day. But the infant's kidneys began to fail during the afternoon and she required peritoneal dialysis around 7 p.m. Two hours later the heart that had saved her life in an historic experimental operation October 26, gave out.
Thereafter the "science writers" took a better look at themselves in the mirror. Even Time Magazine, a staunch paladin of animal experimentation and every profit-oriented venture of the chemo-medical combine, sprinkled a few doubts in an otherwise laudatory "Essay" in its December 3, 1984 issue. Wrote editorialist Charles Krauthammer:
After Baby Fae died, it was argued, retroactively, that in fact the operation reduced her suffering, that she was pink and breathing instead of blue and gasping. Perhaps. But the cameras were brought in only when she was well. She was not seen when not doing well: enduring respirators, cannulas, injections, stitches, arrhythmias, uremia. Was this really less agonal than a natural death, which would have come mercifully weeks earlier?
Tsk, Tsk. Mind your editorial manners, Krauthammer. And in fact he added apologetically:
No. Baby Fae was a means, a conscripted means, to a noble end. This experiment was undertaken to reduce not her suffering, but, perhaps some day, that of others. But is that really wrong? Don't the suffering babies of the future have any claims on us?
That's much better, Charlie! Help keeping the gateways open for more and more foolish experimentation on humans and animals, for the greater glory of that modern religion dubbed Medical Miracles, consisting of ever new, sensational "breakthroughs" that are as shortlived as the morning rose.
As heart juggler Barnard used to claim after each of his failures ("Rejection is no problem" - sic!), Dr. Bailey also declared that his patient had not died because of rejection but from "other causes." In this case, of kidney failure, most probably due to the cyclosporine and other immuno-suppressive toxicants lavishly administered to retard the natural, and therefore eventually inevitable, rejection process.
It took Loma Linda's Brain Trust exactly one year to come up with a suitable alibi, which would allow them to try again. The admission that either rejection of the baboon heart had caused the baby's death, or else the medications intended to prevent rejection, would have impeded a resumption of such wild experiments. So some other reason had to be thought up.
The Loma Linda medical Brain Trust stuck their collective heads together and did some hard thinking during twelve months, before coming up with what they thought was a really smart apology, epitomized by the headline in the Los Angeles Times of October 16, 1985: "Baby Fae's Death Traced to Blood Mismatch Error." The story, by the Times' Medical writer Robert Stembrook, went:Baby Fae died because of a "catastrophic" medical decision to transplant the heart of a baboon that had a different blood type, the surgeon who performed the operation said Tuesday.
The infant's blood was type 0 and the baboon was type AB.
"If Baby Fae had the type AB blood group she would still be alive today", Dr. Bailey said.
Originally, it was thought that rejection of the heart or kidney damage by the anticyclosporine-A may have caused her death. But the autopsy -rejection drug showed only rejection in the heart and no drug damage to the "minimal" signs of kidneys, the surgeon said.
Nobody bothered to explain why it took Dr. Bailey one whole year to announce these simple findings of the autopsy, which as any assiduous moviegoer knows can be done, if need be, in a night; nor did anybody tell the public that no monkey ever has exactly the same blood type as a human being, or that cyclosporine destroys the kidneys. The public must be made to believe that next time the medicine men will just have to match the blood types correctly to achieve success.
The Times article went on to show that Dr. Bailey had endured the drawn-out suffering and death of his experimental baby patient with enviable aplomb, and even with good humor, in the course of what was presented as a "comprehensive review containing significant new information about the controversial transplant," to wit:
The surgeon, who has largely refrained from public comment on the case, appeared relaxed and told several jokes in the course of his 45-minute presentation to more than 200 physicians, nurses and other health care workers. He declined to elaborate or clarify his remarks to reporters after the meeting.
That's the smart way to avoid any controversy, doc: refusing to explain one's own foolish statements.+
Who's next on the agenda of the Loma Linda University Medical Center?
P.S.: The cost of the Baby Fae experiment came close to $100,000 -without doctors' fees, as the medical wizards involved allegedly contributed their skills gratuitously, for the sake of experimentation. That amount of money, rather than to prolong the suffering of a dying baby, might have been better spent on a more humanitarian treatment of the regular lying-in patients, which as a rule is not rated very high in American hospitals.
How good is the patient's care at Loma Linda?
From the Washington Post, October 18, 1981: "Experimental Drugs: Death in the Search for Cures."
A one-year study by the Washington Post has documented 620 cases in which experimental drugs have been implicated in the death of cancer patients...
In Boston a hospital tested a new NCI drug on children. Their kidneys were lost within days...The experimental drugs, in addition to leading to hundreds of deaths, have elicited a nightmarish list of serious adverse reactions, including kidney failure, liver failure, heart failure, respiratory distress, destruction of bone marrow so the body can no longer make blood, brain damage, paralysis, seizure, coma, and visual hallucinations.
So little is known about many of these chemicals that doctors have found these ironic results: In some cases the experimental drug actually stimulated tumor growth rather than stopped the cancer; and in other tests, doctors and researchers found that the experimental drugs themselves caused cancer.
The above is but a sample from a whole series of articles on the subject of wild experimentation with humans, mainly children, published by the Washington Post in the fall of 1981.