US scientists are preparing to perform the world's first full-face transplant.
The 24-hour operation involves lifting an entire face from a dead donor -- including nose cartilage, nerves and muscles -- and transferring them to someone disfigured by burns or other injuries.
A team at the University of Louisville in Kentucky has submitted a 30-page request to the university's ethics committee, New Scientist magazine reports yesterday.
Peter Butler, a surgeon at London's Royal Free Hospital, called for a debate on the procedure in 2002.
The Royal College of Surgeons for England and Wales urged caution and decided last year that, for the time being, the risks of such an operation outweighed the possible benefits.
But John Barker, leader of the Louisville team, told New Scientist: "Caution by itself will not get us any closer."
Faces have been replaced before. In 1994, a nine-year-old child in northern India lost her face and scalp in a threshing machine accident.
Her parents raced to hospital with her face in a plastic bag and a surgeon managed to reconnect the arteries and replant the skin.
There have been similar successes in the US and Australia
Hands have been transplanted, as well as thighs and knee bones, and a one-month-old baby girl survived a hand and arm transplant. Transplants of kidneys, lungs, hearts and other tissue are now routine: the only constraint is a shortage of donors.
But a full-face transplant -- of the kind used on Nicolas Cage and John Travolta in the science-fiction thriller Face/Off -- is a bigger challenge.
More than 30 muscles are involved in facial movements: for example, it takes 17 muscles simply to smile.
Surgeons would need to save not just the donor's skin -- from hairline to jawline and from ear to ear -- but also the nose, mouth and lips, eyebrows and eyelids, subcutaneous fat, some of the muscles, the nasal substructure and the nerves.
Then they would have to painstakingly reconnect all of this to someone rendered almost unrecognizable by burns or scarring.
The recipient would then require a lifetime's supply of immunosuppressive drugs to maintain the new face.
Some burns victims have had more than 50 skin-graft operations to rebuild faces that they believe to be still hopelessly disfigured.
Surgeons argue that whole-face transplants would produce better results.
New Scientist worked with a television company, Mentorn, and an animation firm to conduct a "virtual transplant," stretching the facial skin of a virtual donor over the bone structure of a virtual patient.
Appearance is dictated not just by skin, but by bone structure, and surgeons are not sure how closely a reconstructed face would resemble a donor's at the end of the operation.
The technical challenges are huge.
So are the ethical dilemmas.
A fire caused by a burst gas pipe yesterday spread to several homes and sent a fireball soaring into the sky outside Malaysia’s largest city, injuring more than 100 people. The towering inferno near a gas station in Putra Heights outside Kuala Lumpur was visible for kilometers and lasted for several hours. It happened during a public holiday as Muslims, who are the majority in Malaysia, celebrate the second day of Eid al-Fitr. National oil company Petronas said the fire started at one of its gas pipelines at 8:10am and the affected pipeline was later isolated. Disaster management officials said shutting the
US Vice President J.D. Vance on Friday accused Denmark of not having done enough to protect Greenland, when he visited the strategically placed and resource-rich Danish territory coveted by US President Donald Trump. Vance made his comment during a trip to the Pituffik Space Base in northwestern Greenland, a visit viewed by Copenhagen and Nuuk as a provocation. “Our message to Denmark is very simple: You have not done a good job by the people of Greenland,” Vance told a news conference. “You have under-invested in the people of Greenland, and you have under-invested in the security architecture of this
Japan unveiled a plan on Thursday to evacuate around 120,000 residents and tourists from its southern islets near Taiwan within six days in the event of an “emergency”. The plan was put together as “the security situation surrounding our nation grows severe” and with an “emergency” in mind, the government’s crisis management office said. Exactly what that emergency might be was left unspecified in the plan but it envisages the evacuation of around 120,000 people in five Japanese islets close to Taiwan. China claims Taiwan as part of its territory and has stepped up military pressure in recent years, including
UNREST: The authorities in Turkey arrested 13 Turkish journalists in five days, deported a BBC correspondent and on Thursday arrested a reporter from Sweden Waving flags and chanting slogans, many hundreds of thousands of anti-government demonstrators on Saturday rallied in Istanbul, Turkey, in defence of democracy after the arrest of Istanbul Mayor Ekrem Imamoglu which sparked Turkey’s worst street unrest in more than a decade. Under a cloudless blue sky, vast crowds gathered in Maltepe on the Asian side of Turkey’s biggest city on the eve of the Eid al-Fitr celebration which started yesterday, marking the end of Ramadan. Ozgur Ozel, chairman of the main opposition Republican People’s Party (CHP), which organized the rally, said there were 2.2 million people in the crowd, but
RSS