MEDICINE: TAKING A BIG RISK FOR A CURE

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HE USED TO BE A SELF-DESCRIBED yuppie, more interested in acquiring houses and cars than in pursuing causes. But Jeff Getty's life changed forever in 1985, when he learned he was HIV positive. Getty, now 38, retired from his job as an administrative analyst at the University of California, Berkeley, a few years later and devoted himself to AIDS activism. He devoured immunology textbooks, traveled to Mexico to bring back experimental therapies to the U.S. and joined protests demanding the government speed approval of new AIDS drugs.

Still, nothing could have prepared him for his latest, and possibly greatest, fight. It took more than a year and some intense lobbying for Getty to win the right to become the first AIDS patient to receive a baboon bone-marrow transplant. He overcame the last bureaucratic hurdle in August, when the Food and Drug Administration agreed to allow Getty, and Getty alone, to undergo the procedure. Then in the fall, he developed potentially fatal pneumocystis pneumonia, which postponed the transplant until December.

All those obstacles were behind him last week, though, as he left the hospital. "To the naysayers who said I would never recover from this procedure, well, here I am," Getty told reporters. Still, his struggle is far from over. It will be several weeks before doctors know if the graft successfully took hold, and months before they can be sure that Getty's slowly strengthening immune system has accepted the foreign tissue permanently. Most doctors don't believe Getty has much chance of success. But considering the alternative, he doesn't have a thing to lose. --By Christine Gorman. Reported by D. Blake Hallanan/San Francisco