another day at the movies
May. 30th, 2004 05:46 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
rktUS scientists plan full-face transplant
LOUISVILLE (Kentucky) - Scientists in the United States have raised eyebrows with the news that they are prepared to perform the world's first full-face transplant
If permission is granted, the complicated 24-hour operation will be a world's first. --
Surgeons would lift an entire face - nose cartilage, nerves, muscles and all - from a dead donor, much like a scene from the science fiction movie, Face-Off.
They would then transfer it to someone whose own face has been horribly disfigured in a fire or accident.
New Scientists magazine reported that a team at the University of Louisville in Kentucky had asked the university's ethics committee to give them permission to attempt the complex 24-hour operation.
Team leader John Barker told New Scientist: 'Caution by itself will not get us any closer. If Christopher Columbus were cautious, I'd probably be speaking with a British accent.'
There have been some precedents for the procedure in the US and Australia. Some burns victims have had more than 50 skin graft operations to rebuild faces.
Surgeons also managed to replace the skin and arteries of a nine-year-old child in northern India who lost her face and scalp in a threshing machine accident in 1994, reports London's The Guardian.
Her parents had rushed to the hospital with her face in a plastic bag.
But a full-face transplant would be more complicated because there are more than 30 muscles are involved in facial movements. It takes 17 of them just to smile.
Surgeons would need to save, not just the donor's skin but also the nose, mouth, lips, eyebrows, eyelids and much more.
After painstakingly reconnecting all of this to someone else, the patient would need a lifetime's supply of drugs to keep the new face intact.
Because of the different bone structure, surgeons are not sure how closely a transplanted face would resemble the donor's.
There are also other considerations.
Mr Peter Rowe, chairman of the British Transplantation Society ethical committee, told The Guardian a patient would have to come to terms with a new identity anyway, and he might as well do it with his own instead of someone else's. So why, he asked, do the transplant at all?
http://straitstimes.asia1.com.sg/topstories/story/0,4386,253188,00.html
LOUISVILLE (Kentucky) - Scientists in the United States have raised eyebrows with the news that they are prepared to perform the world's first full-face transplant
If permission is granted, the complicated 24-hour operation will be a world's first. --
Surgeons would lift an entire face - nose cartilage, nerves, muscles and all - from a dead donor, much like a scene from the science fiction movie, Face-Off.
They would then transfer it to someone whose own face has been horribly disfigured in a fire or accident.
New Scientists magazine reported that a team at the University of Louisville in Kentucky had asked the university's ethics committee to give them permission to attempt the complex 24-hour operation.
Team leader John Barker told New Scientist: 'Caution by itself will not get us any closer. If Christopher Columbus were cautious, I'd probably be speaking with a British accent.'
There have been some precedents for the procedure in the US and Australia. Some burns victims have had more than 50 skin graft operations to rebuild faces.
Surgeons also managed to replace the skin and arteries of a nine-year-old child in northern India who lost her face and scalp in a threshing machine accident in 1994, reports London's The Guardian.
Her parents had rushed to the hospital with her face in a plastic bag.
But a full-face transplant would be more complicated because there are more than 30 muscles are involved in facial movements. It takes 17 of them just to smile.
Surgeons would need to save, not just the donor's skin but also the nose, mouth, lips, eyebrows, eyelids and much more.
After painstakingly reconnecting all of this to someone else, the patient would need a lifetime's supply of drugs to keep the new face intact.
Because of the different bone structure, surgeons are not sure how closely a transplanted face would resemble the donor's.
There are also other considerations.
Mr Peter Rowe, chairman of the British Transplantation Society ethical committee, told The Guardian a patient would have to come to terms with a new identity anyway, and he might as well do it with his own instead of someone else's. So why, he asked, do the transplant at all?
http://straitstimes.asia1.com.sg/topstories/story/0,4386,253188,00.html
