Baboons

The world's second baboon-to-human liver transplant recipient has failed to fully awaken four days after his surgery, possibly because his liver was not functioning as well as anticipated, doctors said Thursday. As a result, doctors Thursday performed a liver biopsy on the patient, a 62-year-old man who has not been identified, said a University of Pittsburgh Medical Center spokeswoman.

AIDS patient Jeff Getty relaxed in his Oakland home Thursday, three weeks after he was infused with baboon cells as a last-ditch effort to treat his disease. Getty's San Francisco General Hospital physician, Dr. Steven Deeks, discharged the 38-year-old after three weeks of in-house observation, saying that he "is doing well." However, he said it was too early to tell if the procedure would help fight Getty's disease.

An Oakland man dying of AIDS underwent a historic baboon bone marrow transplant Thursday evening in a last-ditch attempt to save his life. Jeff Getty, 38, has been fighting for two years to get permission for the controversial experiment, which may offer him a few more months of survival or which, critics charge, may kill him. "It's about time," Getty said in a prepared statement. "I'm lucky to still be alive."

Jeff Getty was in an isolation ward at San Francisco General Hospital on Friday reading newspaper reports about his landmark baboon bone marrow transplant as he began a nerve-racking three- to four-week wait to learn if he will live or die. Getty submitted to chemotherapy and radiation treatments Thursday to destroy part of his bone marrow before undergoing the transplant that physicians hope will save his life. "This is where it gets tricky," Dr.

In a country torn apart by civil war, not every story is of agony. So, while Rwanda struggles to rebuild and coax its people back to their homes, it can be noted that the baboons are moving in and living it up. Here, on a hilltop with a 100-mile view of the Central African wilderness, is a two-star safari lodge known as Akagera Hotel. Until this spring's war, it was a tourist destination for wildlife fanciers. Today, with tourists gone, the wildlife has moved into the Akagera Hotel.

For 13 months, biologist Leah Domb lived in the wilds of Tanzania's Gombe National Park watching baboons--paying extra special attention to the females with big, red rear ends. Domb went there in the mid-1990s to help solve a bit of a mystery. Why do the rumps of female baboons swell up each month around the time that they are fertile? And what do males see in such a vivid display?

A 62-year-old Pittsburgh man who received a baboon liver in a Sunday evening operation was groggy but in good condition Monday, his surgeons said. The unidentified man, who before the 13-hour operation had only an estimated 30 days to live because of a fatal liver disease, is the second human to receive a baboon liver. He could not be given a human liver because of an active hepatitis B infection, which would infect and destroy a transplanted human liver.

Stanford University biologist Robert Sapolsky travels thousands of miles each summer to try to better understand stress. He has spent more than 15 summers in the forests in the East African Serengeti, where he carefully monitors a troop of olive baboons he hopes will help unlock the secret of stress. With the crudest of tools, he painstakingly watches and records the baboons' daily lives, identifying leaders and followers and collecting blood samples to be tested for hormonal changes.

The landmark baboon bone marrow transplant undergone by Jeff Getty last month in San Francisco raises the hope--albeit a remote one--of a bold new way to prolong the lives of AIDS patients by increasing their ability to fight off the opportunistic infections that are the cause of most AIDS-related deaths. But the research behind that controversial transplant may have far broader ramifications.

A terminally ill 35-year-old man who received a baboon liver in a historic but untested operation was said by doctors Monday at University of Pittsburgh Medical Center to be doing as well as could be expected. The 11-hour surgery, which ended late Sunday, is the first known baboon-to-human liver transplant. If the experiment succeeds, it is likely to focus renewed interest on the use of animals for transplants because of the shortage of human organs.