The Heart of the Matter

In 1984, America was gripped by the story of “Baby Fae”. Stephanie Fae Beauclair was born with Hypoplastic left heart syndrome (HLHS), a rare congenital heart defect in which the left side of the heart is severely underdeveloped and unable to pump blood properly around the body. Leonard Lee Bailey was a pioneering surgeon who specialised in paediatric heart disease and had undertaken extensive research in mammalian transplants. Given how ill baby Fae was, and the hopelessness of the