Leonard Bailey, MD, the renowned Loma Linda University Health surgeon who garnered international media attention in 1984 for transplanting a baboon’s heart into a human infant known as “Baby Fae,” the research from which spawned human-to-human infant heart transplants and other cardiac treatment breakthroughs, died on Sunday, May 12, 2019, at the age of 76 following a battle with cancer.
I met Dr. Bailey in the early 1980’s when the husband of one of my colleagues at Moreno Valley Unified School District survived what would probably have been a surgery leading to his death, when Dr. Bailey, realizing the likely outcome, proceeded to perform a procedure he had read about in a French medical journal, but never seen done in person. My colleague’s husband lived for many more years, in reasonable health. What a trailblazer, and a genuinely kind man.
