Most of the time we try and keep you up to speed with what’s happening today, but every now and again we’ll take a trip down memory lane.

I stumbled across the story of Baby Fae this week, and if you’re not familiar with this one then you’re in for a few surprises.

In 1984 Dr. Leonard Bailey transplanted a baboon heart into an infant named Stephanie Fae Beauclair, and she actually survived for 21 days.

TIME did a piece back in 2015 that covers how this one played out:

Beauclair was born three weeks premature with hypoplastic left heart syndrome, a fatal defect in which the left side of the heart is underdeveloped. Though babies with the condition were expected to live for about two weeks, and Fae’s mother was given the option of letting her die in a hospital or at home, Dr. Bailey [ below, in 2007] had another option in mind.

…no one had yet completed a successful infant heart transplant, mainly due to the lack of infant donor hearts. Given that shortage, Bailey, a pediatric [sic] cardiac surgeon at Loma Linda University Medical Center in California, had spent seven years researching xenografts, or transplants from other species.

Bailey had conducted around 150 transplants between animals of different species before, and there had actually been an example of a human baby receiving a simian heart in 1964.

On that occasion the baby had died within a few hours of the surgery, so it was very much a shot in the dark when Bailey operated on 12-day-old Fae on October 26:

Fae’s “new heart began to beat spontaneously. ‘There was absolute awe,’” recalled Sandra Nehlsen-Cannarella, a transplantation immunologist working on Fae. “I don’t think there was a dry eye in the room”

…Although Fae initially improved steadily, she began to decline 14 days after the transplant and died on Nov. 16, 1984. Upon her death, TIME wrote, “So ended an extraordinary experiment that had captured the attention of the world and made medical history. For three weeks the 5-lb. infant had survived with the heart of a baboon—more than two weeks longer than any previous recipient of an animal heart.”

Less than 12 months later, Bailey would perform the first successful infant heart transplant.

Another case of truth being stranger than fiction, right?

[source:time]