On 26 October 1984, an infant known as Baby Fae received a baboon heart at Loma Linda University Medical Center in California. She survived for 21 days before dying from complications related to rejection. The case became a worldwide media event and remains a landmark in debates over xenotransplantation, infant surgery, consent, and experimental medicine.

Baby Fae's story had the compressed emotional power of modern tragedy: innocence, animal life, desperate parents, surgical ambition, and public spectacle. It gave writers a disturbing new image for the boundaries between human and animal, miracle and experiment, compassion and hubris.