Twenty Days with a Borrowed Heart: The Baby Fae Story
On October 26, 1984, surgeons gave a dying twelve-day-old baby a baboon's heart — a twenty-day struggle that changed infant medicine.
She was twelve days old, weighed five pounds, and her heart could not keep her alive.
The baby girl — called "Baby Fae" by the doctors, to protect her family's privacy — was born on October 14, 1984, in Barstow, California, with hypoplastic left heart syndrome: the left side of her heart was too underdeveloped to pump blood to her body. In 1984 there was no established cure. The standard medical advice of the era, as her surgeon later put it, was essentially to take the baby home and let nature take its course.
Her mother refused to accept that. At Loma Linda University Medical Center in Southern California, pediatric heart surgeon Dr. Leonard Bailey had spent years doing experimental heart transplants in infant animals — more than 200 of them — and he believed he saw a narrow path forward. Human infant hearts for transplant were almost impossible to find. Bailey's theory was that a newborn's immature immune system might accept an animal heart more readily than an adult's would, buying the child time until a human heart became available. No one had ever tried it in a human infant.
On October 26, 1984, Bailey and his team did what had never been done: they removed the baby's failing heart and replaced it with the healthy, walnut-sized heart of a young baboon. The operation worked. The tiny heart began beating in the baby's chest, and for a while there was hope — real, measurable hope. Her breathing improved. Her color improved. The world watched; the case became one of the biggest medical stories of the year.
But the hope did not hold. Over the following days her body began rejecting the foreign organ — a process likely worsened, doctors later concluded, by a blood-type mismatch between the baby and the baboon donor. To fight the rejection, the team increased her doses of the anti-rejection drug cyclosporine, which in turn damaged her kidneys. After twenty days of struggle, on November 15, her heart failed. She died in her mother's arms, having lived longer than any previous human recipient of an animal heart — the three earlier attempts, the last in 1977, had all ended within days.
The case ignited a fierce debate that outlived the baby. Ethicists questioned whether the family had truly understood the odds, and whether an untested procedure should have been tried at all. Animal-rights protesters called it "ghoulish tinkering." Others argued that desperate parents deserved the right to try anything, and that medicine only advances when someone is brave enough to go first.
What is not debated is what came next. Bailey and his team poured everything they had learned from those twenty days into building an infant heart-transplant program. Just over a year later, in November 1985, Loma Linda performed the first successful infant-to-infant heart transplant — on a baby the staff called "Baby Moses," who grew into a healthy young adult. The center went on to perform hundreds of pediatric heart transplants, and the knowledge gained from Baby Fae's case helped shape the field worldwide.
The family's identity stayed private for 25 years. In 2009 her mother, Teresa Beauclair, finally spoke publicly, revealing that the baby's name was Stephanie Fae. She had made an impossible choice in an impossible situation — and in doing so, she and her daughter changed the odds for thousands of babies who came after.
Image: The Loma Linda University medical campus in Loma Linda, California, home of the medical center where Baby Fae's transplant took place in 1984, photographed by Lroehlig, CC BY-SA 4.0 (via Wikimedia Commons).
