Baby Fae

The procedure, performed by Leonard Lee Bailey at Loma Linda University Medical Center, was successful, but Fae died 21 days later of heart failure due to rejection of the transplant. The rejection is thought to have been caused largely by a humoral response against the graft, due to Fae's type O blood creating antibodies against the type AB xenograft. The blood type incompatibility was seen as unavoidable: fewer than 1% of baboons are type O, and Loma Linda only had seven young female baboons—all of which were type AB—available as potential donors.

A baboon heart was used as there was no time for a suitable human heart to be found. It was hoped that the transplant could be replaced by an allograft at a later date, before Fae's body began generating isohaemagglutinins, but a suitable donor could not be found in time. Prior to the procedure, no infant heart transplant—even with human hearts—had been successfully performed due to a lack of infant human hearts. To address this issue, Bailey had become a pioneer in the research of cross-species heart transplants, which had included "more than 150 transplants in sheep, goats, and baboons".

In the 2010 episode “The Silent Partners” of the Adult Swim cartoon, The Venture Bros., Billy Quizboy refers to Monstroso as “Baby Fae” before performing experimental heart surgery on him, transplanting Monstroso’s failing heart with the heart of the recently deceased villain, King Gorilla.

Although Fae's full name was not made public at the time of the procedure, her mother chose to reveal herself in 1997.

In the 1993 episode "I Love Lisa" of The Simpsons, the school cafeteria serves beef hearts in honor of Valentine's Day. Bart Simpson puts one under his shirt, exclaiming "My baboon heart! Body ... rejecting it!" before dramatically everting it onto the table.

Christian Slater's character in the 1993 film Untamed Heart was inspired by Baby Fae, and the film was originally titled The Baboon Heart in tribute to her. Screenwriter Tom Serchio later said that when writing the screenplay, he was thinking less of Baby Fae directly and that it was more about being intrigued by the Paul Simon song and the lyrics that reference her.

The Paul Simon song "The Boy in the Bubble" from the 1986 Graceland album references her in the lyrics: "Medicine is magical and magical is art / Thinking of the Boy in the Bubble / And the baby with the baboon heart."

Stephanie Fae Beauclair (October 14, 1984 – November 15, 1984), better known as Baby Fae, was an American infant born in 1984 with hypoplastic left heart syndrome. She became the first infant subject of a xenotransplant procedure and first successful infant heart transplant, receiving the heart of a baboon. Though she died within a month of the procedure, she lived weeks longer than any previous recipient of a non-human heart.