Taiwan-born physician Andrew Lee (李為平) is scheduled to head a three-man team at Johns Hopkins Hospital in Baltimore, Maryland, that is to conduct the first penile transplant surgeries in the US for soldiers wounded in combat in Afghanistan and Iraq.
The Johns Hopkins University School of Medicine has given permission for the team to conduct experimental surgery on 60 veterans within the year, the New York Times (NYT) reported on Monday.
Lee, chairman of plastic and reconstructive surgery at Johns Hopkins, immigrated with his family to the US when he was 15 years old.
He established his authority in limb transplants in 2013 after surgically transplanting two arms for a veteran who had been wounded in the second Iraq War.
The proposed 60 surgeries are to be restricted to men who have suffered genitourinary injuries in combat, the hospital said.
The school will monitor the results and decide whether the operation procedures could become standard for such surgeries in the future, the NYT said.
The transplant should, over a matter of months, restore urinary function, sensation and even the ability to have sex, the university said.
Lee said it was a “realistic goal” for those who had undergone the transplant to father children, with the newspaper reporting that it would be their own sperm and not that of the donors, provided the recipient’s testes were intact prior to the surgery.
Jeffrey Kahn, a bioethicist at Johns Hopkins, said it was essential for families of organ donors to be asked for specific permission.
“It is not assumed that people willing to donate kidneys or livers will also consent to having their loved one’s genitals removed,” the NYT quoted Kahn saying, adding the surgeons want a relatively young donor to increase the odds that the transplanted organ will function sexually.
Medical journal data show only two reports of penis transplants: one in China in 2006, which was not successful, and one in South Africa last year, which was.
A group of Taiwanese-American and Tibetan-American students at Harvard University on Saturday disrupted Chinese Ambassador to the US Xie Feng’s (謝鋒) speech at the school, accusing him of being responsible for numerous human rights violations. Four students — two Taiwanese Americans and two from Tibet — held up banners inside a conference hall where Xie was delivering a speech at the opening ceremony of the Harvard Kennedy School China Conference 2024. In a video clip provided by the Coalition of Students Resisting the CCP (Chinese Communist Party), Taiwanese-American Cosette Wu (吳亭樺) and Tibetan-American Tsering Yangchen are seen holding banners that together read:
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