Dr. Leonard L. Bailey, the California surgeon who supervised the pioneering transplant last month of a baboon heart to the infant Baby Fac, Predicted soon after the procedure was completed that his tiny patient would lead a "long and healthy" life.

The world waited and watched for encouraging signs, and for three weeks it looked as though the prognosis from the Loma Linda Medical Center would prove as steady and true as the pulse of the first-ever human recipient of an animal heart.

Then last week, after Bailey had all but convinced Baby Fae's news-hungry fans, that all was fine and as suddenly as the story of her heart had flashed across newspapers and television screens worldwide, the infant died.

Bailey vowed to try again, not wanting to waste the lessons of what he called a "pioneering effort." But others, including many Harvard doctors familiar with transplant procedures, as well as government officials and animal-rights activists had a different response to the death Baby Fae.

Calling Bailey's transplant unethical, impractical and improper, experts at Harvard and other observers have expressed at Harvard and other observers have expressed anger over Bailey's experiment, charging that the procedure performed to replace Baby Fae's defective original heart simply could not succeed because it ignored the bounds of all current life-saving technology.

Several doctors interviewed this week suggested that Baby Fae had little chance of survival as a result of this operation and suggested several alternatives which may have saved her life. In addition to the medical controversy, an ethical dilemna has developed as a result of Baby Fae, founded on the lack of government regulation and planning previous to the operation.

You can count the number of animal-to-human transplants on one hand and they have all been totally hopeless.

"For all practical purposes there is not evidence to suggest that a xenograph [species-to-species] transplantation could be successful," Professor of Medicine Nicholas L. Tilney '58, one of several doctors to conduct the first heart transplant in New England, says after Baby Fae's death. "There is no biological evidence to suggest that the immune system could be sufficiently supressed to subdue the baby's rejection of the heart, and there must be some biological evidence before one can conduct on operation."

"You can count the number of animal-to-human transplants on one hand and they have all been totally hopeless," says Professor of Surgery Lawrence H. Cohn, another heart transplant pioneer. The implantation of a foreign organ from a different species into a human causes continuous, massive rejection even though the organs are functionally similar, he says. Doctors are barely able to repress rejection in human-to-human transplants, he added.

But Cohn did offer some positive encouragement also. He says the new wonder immune-suppressions drug, cyclosporin, which was pioneered for use with heart transplants at the Harvard-affiliated Brigham and Women's Hospital (BWH) last year, had not yet been tested in cross-species transplantation and indicated that Bailey was going to attempt the operation. However, he says that the likelihood of success even with the new drug was minimal.

"It is extremely suppressing that she survived as long as she did," says Tilney, adding however that he attributes this to the immaturity of Baby Fae's immune system and her increased tolerance for foreign organs as a neo-natal and not the success of the operation. "She couldn't recognize the difference between herself and the other and thus did not reject the heart as quickly as an adult would have."

The operation also involves much more than the theoretical potential of the transplant to extend the baby's life, it also involves presenting a true assessment of the process to the public, says Raphael H. Levey, chief of transplants surgery at BWH. "I'm not glad the operation was tried at this time. Cyclosporin is not the miracle drug it's cracked up to be and it's not good to create hype and give false hope to the public, while seeking undue publicity for an unjustified operation."

But Professor of Surgery Gilbert H. Mudge, another heart transplant specialist, looked more favorably upon the operation. He emphasized that cyclosporin had yet to be tested in xenographs and there was a possibility of such transplants being successful. "I think it was a heroic attempt to save a life which would have inevitably died, and, although the operation was not a breakthrough, it did use a new technique [cyclo-porin] and therefore was reasonable."

Although very few experts believe that the transplant stood a chance of long-term success, there remains this question of whether any alternative procedures to Bailey's xenograph operation existed.

The day after Bailey's five-hour operation, a report in the Los Angeles Times confirmed that a human heart was available at the UCLA medical school located only 50 miles from Loma Linda. In addition, other procedures, namely the so-called Norwood operation--which attempts, by surgery, to make the defective heart function normally--used extensively by Dr. Aldo R. Castenada of the Harvard-affiliated Children's Hospital, might have been employed with more success.