Doctors at Johns Hopkins University School of Medicine on Monday said that they had performed the world’s first total penis and scrotum transplant on a US military serviceman who was wounded in Afghanistan.
The 14-hour operation was performed on March 26 by a team of nine plastic surgeons and two urologic surgeons led by Taiwanese-American W.P. Andrew Lee (李為平), a professor of plastic and reconstructive surgery and chairman of the school’s plastic and reconstructive surgery department.
“We are optimistic that he will regain near-normal urinary and sexual functions following a full recovery,” Lee told reporters.
Photo: Johns Hopkins School of Medicine / AFP
The patient was severely injured by a blast from an improvised explosive device in Afghanistan several years ago, Lee said.
The entire penis, scrotum without testicles and partial abdominal wall came from a deceased donor.
“It’s a real mind-boggling injury to suffer; it is not an easy one to accept,” the recipient said in a statement. “When I first woke up, I felt finally more normal.”
The man lost his testicles in the explosion and did not get them restored as part of his transplant.
“The testicles were not transplanted, because we had made a decision early in the program to not transplant germline tissue, that is to say not transplant tissue that generates sperm, because this would raise a number of ethical questions,” plastic surgeon Damon Cooney said.
Doctors said they are hopeful the man will be able to urinate with his penis in the coming weeks, and that he will eventually regain enough sensation to achieve an erection.
The extent of his sexual function will not be known for about six months, doctors said.
Lee was born in what was then-Kaohsiung County’s Gangshan Township (岡山) to a father serving in the Republic of China Air Force. He immigrated to the US when he was 15 to join an older brother and sister who had immigrated earlier.
He earned an honors degree in physics from Harvard and his medical degree from Johns Hopkins, where he also completed his general surgery residency and a microvascular research fellowship before completing his plastic surgery fellowship at Massachusetts General.
Initially specializing in hand surgery, he has been working on human-to-human limb transplantation since 1986. When he was chief of plastic surgery at the University of Pittsburgh Medical Center, he led a team that performed the first bilateral arm transplant in the US on an injured soldier.
Additional reporting by staff writer and CNA
FAST RELEASE: The council lauded the developer for completing model testing in only four days and releasing a commercial version for use by academia and industry The National Science and Technology Council (NSTC) yesterday released the latest artificial intelligence (AI) language model in traditional Chinese embedded with Taiwanese cultural values. The council launched the Trustworthy AI Dialogue Engine (TAIDE) program in April last year to develop and train traditional Chinese-language models based on LLaMA, the open-source AI language model released by Meta. The program aims to tackle the information bias that is often present in international large-scale language models and take Taiwanese culture and values into consideration, it said. Llama 3-TAIDE-LX-8B-Chat-Alpha1, released yesterday, is the latest large language model in traditional Chinese. It was trained based on Meta’s Llama-3-8B
STUMPED: KMT and TPP lawmakers approved a resolution to suspend the rate hike, which the government said was unavoidable in view of rising global energy costs The Ministry of Economic Affairs yesterday said it has a mandate to raise electricity prices as planned after the legislature passed a non-binding resolution along partisan lines to freeze rates. Chinese Nationalist Party (KMT) lawmakers proposed the resolution to suspend the price hike, which passed by a 59-50 vote. The Taiwan People’s Party (TPP) voted with the KMT. Legislative Speaker Han Kuo-yu (韓國瑜) of the KMT said the resolution is a mandate for the “immediate suspension of electricity price hikes” and for the Executive Yuan to review its energy policy and propose supplementary measures. A government-organized electricity price evaluation board in March
NO-LIMITS PARTNERSHIP: ‘The bottom line’ is that if the US were to have a conflict with China or Russia it would likely open up a second front with the other, a US senator said Beijing and Moscow could cooperate in a conflict over Taiwan, the top US intelligence chief told the US Senate this week. “We see China and Russia, for the first time, exercising together in relation to Taiwan and recognizing that this is a place where China definitely wants Russia to be working with them, and we see no reason why they wouldn’t,” US Director of National Intelligence Avril Haines told a US Senate Committee on Armed Services hearing on Thursday. US Senator Mike Rounds asked Haines about such a potential scenario. He also asked US Defense Intelligence Agency Director Lieutenant General Jeffrey Kruse
NOVEL METHODS: The PLA has adopted new approaches and recently conducted three combat readiness drills at night which included aircraft and ships, an official said Taiwan is monitoring China’s People’s Liberation Army (PLA) exercises for changes in their size or pattern as the nation prepares for president-elect William Lai’s (賴清德) inauguration on May 20, National Security Bureau (NSB) Director-General Tsai Ming-yen (蔡明彥) said yesterday. Tsai made the comment at a meeting of the Legislative Yuan’s Foreign Affairs and National Defense Committee, in response to Democratic Progressive Party (DPP) Legislator Wang Ting-yu’s (王定宇) questions. China continues to employ a carrot-and-stick approach, in which it applies pressure with “gray zone” tactics, while attempting to entice Taiwanese with perks, Tsai said. These actions aim to help Beijing look like it has