Spare Parts from Chimp to Man

Less than two months ago, Jefferson Davis, 44, was edging perilously close to certain death. A Negro dock worker, he had been in New Orleans' Charity Hospital since January with steadily worsening kidney disease. Doctors had kept him alive by dialysis, pumping salt and sugar solutions into his abdominal cavity to leach out the body's metabolic poisons. But this process could not keep him going indefinitely. And his doctors could find no human donor to give Davis new hope for life.

Even though transplantation of a kidney from man to man is still highly experimental and seldom successful for long, Charity Hospital surgeons had more desperately ill patients needing transplants than there were human donors available. Early this fall they had made an heroic attempt to deal with the shortage by transplanting two kidneys from a rhesus monkey to a 32-year-old woman (TIME, Oct. 25). But after a few days, the patient died. All the doctors could offer Davis was the same sort of slim chance.

Matched Blood. For a week, Davis was dosed with three potent drugs that suppress the body's natural tendency to reject any "foreign" protein. In Tulane University's colony of primates, hematologists checked the blood group of Adam, an 80-lb. chimpanzee about seven years old. It was type A, like Davis'. On the appointed day, Davis and Adam lay in operating rooms on opposite sides of the street. At the School of Medicine, Adam was anesthetized, and his temperature was dropped to 90DEG. Then a surgeon removed the animal's two kidneys along with their ureters and a generous supply of blood vessels.

Across the street in Charity Hospital, other surgeons made an incision in Davis' right flank. They implanted the chimp's ureters in Davis' bladder, and made artery and vein connections. Within ten minutes after the hookup, Adam's kidneys began to purify Davis' blood and produce urine for him.

Davis did well for four days. Then his system tried to reject the graft. He ran a fever, and the kidneys began to falter. The doctors boosted Davis' dosage of immunity-suppressing drugs. To their relief, the treatment worked. In the fourth week there was another, similar crisis. Adam's kidneys were behaving toward their new host in about the way a transplanted human kidney would have. X rays and increased drug doses got the fever down and the kidneys went back to work.

"I Wanted to Live." Last week, a month and a half after his operation, Davis strode into a Tulane news conference and proclaimed: "I feel better now than I have in five years." How did he feel about having kidneys from a chimpanzee? "The doctors explained I couldn't live with what I'd got. I was worried, of course--but not about the animal business. I knew it would be a monkey. It didn't bother me. All I wanted to do was to survive. I feel wonderful." Feeling that way, Davis went home for Christmas with his four children, ages 13 to 19. "I'll just sit back and wait for the mailman," he said. With a Government pension he will no longer have to load bananas.

The twelve-man team of physicians and surgeons headed by Dr. Keith Reemtsma emphasized that the Davis transplant is no science-fiction spectacular. Said Dr. Reemtsma: "We have taken every precaution with this transplant. Even if it should now fail, we could still defend its use ethically and medically." One factor that gives this operation a better chance of success than the woman's is that her transplant, from a 25-lb. monkey, had small capacity. But even if they functioned at only 50% efficiency, the 80-lb. Adam's kidneys would still be capable of clearing the blood for the 130-lb. Davis.

At week's end, the famed Denver transplant team put a baboon's kidneys in the flank of a 40-year-old man. His condition: "Satisfactory."

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