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| Jeff Getty |
The prominent California AIDS activist who in 1995 received the first bone-marrow transplant from a baboon to treat the disease, has died. Jeff Getty died last Monday of heart failure, following treatment for cancer and a long struggle with AIDS, at the High Desert Medical Center in Joshua Tree, Ken Klueh, his partner of 26 years, told the Associated Press. He was 49.
Getty garnered national attention in 1995 for becoming the first person ever to receive a bone marrow transfusion from a baboon. The procedure, the first interspecies bone marrow transfusion in history, was performed at San Francisco General Hospital with the hope that the baboonís natural AIDS resistance would take root in his own system, reports the AP.
Ultimately the procedure was unsuccessful and sparked furious debate over the moral and medical implications of cross-species transplants.
"That trial reflects the level of desperation at the time," said Dr. Steven Deeks, the University of California, San Francisco, professor who was the experiment's lead investigator, told the AP. "Jeff was just hanging on to his life. He inspired us that a risky and aggressive intervention was worth trying."
According to the San Francisco Chronicle, Getty stayed one step ahead of the disease since the 1980s, when he was diagnosed with AIDS, by battling for early approval of experimental drugs, taking them himself and demanding access for others. He was a pioneer who helped make possible the development of HAART, or the "cocktail" of highly active antiretroviral therapy, that routinely prolongs lives today.
"He is emblematic of a whole group of men who survived AIDS in the early 1980s and 1990s, and made it into the HAART era, but had developed so much resistance to the drugs that they never got their virus fully under control,' Deeks said to the Chronicle.
Getty moved in 2002 to the desert community of Joshua Tree, in San Bernardino County, where he continued his AIDS activism until health problems made it no longer possible. Klueh, his partner, was at his bedside.
"He changed my life," said Klueh to the AP. "He changed a lot of people's lives."
