For many people who are sick from liver, kidney and heart disease, there only chance for survival is to receive a new organ from a suitable organ donor. Yet, most of these patients die in there patient waiting period for that perfect match. For this very reason the whole idea of xenotransplantation is on the rise.

There are many concerns when it comes to transplanting organs in humans. For one, is there a perfect match for every one out there? To help aid in the patient maintaning their new organ they have to take a class of drugs known as immunosuppressants so the body does not reject the new organ. This is the biggest reason transplants have a drawback to them. There have been a number of transplanted organs that have come from baboons as well as pigs. Back in 1984 Baby Fae received her heart from a baboon but only lived approximately 20 days after the procedure. Her death was not caused from a rejection of the organ it was from infections that are common to people who take the immunosuppresant drugs.

Baby Fae was born in October of 1984 at Barstow Community Hospital in Southern California. Her name was significant, it was the name of her mother, grandmother, and great grandmother. She was born with hypoplastic left heart syndrome. A fatal birth defect that is the cause of an underdeveloped left side of her heart. At the time there were two conventional solutions to this problem. The first being a human transplant and the other being palliative surgery. For lack of donor hearts and multi-stage palliative surgery. She was then transported to the Loma Linda University Medical Center where a Dr. Leonard Bailey, M.D consulted with the mother who refused palliative surgery because of the extremely low survival rate of 1.54%. He attained permission to do preliminary testing that day, received permission to carry out the surgery the next day, and took charge of the case. He had heard of cross-species transplants being successfully completed in young animals due to their resiliency and yet undeveloped immune systems and had also done some experimentation of his own. Baby Fae almost died October twenty-second and was expediently scheduled for surgery on the twenty-sixth. Extra security measures were taken in advance of the hushed operation to take place. Baby Fae almost died one more time before she was taken into surgery at six-thirty in the morning of October twenty-sixth. She was carefully put under anesthesia and had her body temperature lowered to sixty-six degrees Fahrenheit. This allowed the doctors to stop her circulation for just over an hour to implant the new walnut sized heart. It started beating on it's own shortly before noon. Post surgery the patient seemed well and the heart was beating at a steady 130 beats per minute, which is a normal rate for infants, save for a brief moment of tachycardia which was stabilized without intervention. Despite the prior positive outlook Baby Fae died November 15, 1984. There was no evidence of graft rejection; however, antibodies were found in her blood after death.

Baboons are not the first choice when it comes to xenotransplantation. Even though primates are genetically and behaviorally more similar to humans they tend to carry more viruses that could easily spread to the human population. HIV was the epidemic feared in the early 80's that spread from chimpanzees in Africa to the human population. Now the biggest fear is mad cow disease which has started over in Great Britain and could begin its phase here in the US at any time. This retrovirus and also the herpes virus from animals could pose a problem in this new wave of technology. Scientists are now looking for pigs to be the first choice since their internal anatomy closely resembles that of humans and that they are easier to breed and genetically engineer. The pharmaceutical company Novartis produces one of the immunosuppressants called Cyclosporin-A. Novartis is the owner of another company in Great Britain named Imutran that is famous for genetic engineering pigs for xenotransplantation. What they are trying to do is develop a new drug that will somehow introduce more human genes into the pig so that when the organ is transplanted into the human, the body will think that the organ is its vary own.

CRT, The Campaign for Responsible Transplantation is a non-profit organization that was established back in January of 1998. They are supported by many physicians, lawyers, scientists, veterinarians, scholars and laypersons. They are seeking to ban the act of xenotransplantation since they feel it will only provide the human race with many more dangers than they already face with disease.