Newborns are meant to be touched, but at the age of 11 days everything about Brandan Owens says hands off. Huddled in his clear Plexiglas incubator in the Newborn Intermediate Care Unit at Jackson Memorial Hospital in Miami, Brandan seems as inaccessible as Snow White in her glass coffin. Born eight weeks premature, weighing four pounds, he is dwarfed by the small blue teddy bear at his feet. Large fire-engine-red letters on the incubator spell out WARNING. A thicket of electrodes taped to his ankle leads to a monitor whose neon-green lines zigzag madly. Every time his heart rate dips below 80 or rises above 120, the monitor beeps. Brandan must live in this artificially warmed environment because his own underdeveloped system cannot regulate his body temperature. He has had several spells of apnea (a brief cessation of breathing), a risk factor for sudden infant death syndrome, the fatal, inexplicable malady that causes sleeping children to stop breathing. Sealed in his Isolette—the very name of the incubator he lies in is forbidding—Brandan seems so remote that when he opens his tiny mouth to cry, the sound appears to come from a great distance.