During the operation, a team of chin, nose and lip surgeons implanted a woman whose face was mutilated by a dog, until she was unable to chew or speak
Avi Blizovsky and a concentration of sources
The patient is in excellent condition, and the implants look like a normal face"
Surgeons in France yesterday succeeded in performing a partial face transplant operation. They implanted a nose in a 38-year-old woman who had a chin nose and lips severed following a dog bite.
The BBC website states that this is a controversial operation in which tissues, muscles, arteries and veins from a donor who died of brain death were transplanted and attached to the lower part of the patient's face. The doctors emphasize that the operated woman will not look like her donor, but also not as she looked before the attack. Instead it will have a "hybrid" face. The operation was conducted on Sunday in the city of Amiens, by surgeons from two hospitals. "The patient is in excellent condition, and the implants look like a normal face," the hospital said in a press statement.
The Walla news network, citing the news agencies, reports that after being attacked by a dog last May, the woman was left without a nose and lips, and was unable to speak or chew. The operation was led by Jean-Michel Dobernard, a specialist doctor from a hospital in Lyon, and Bernard Debuschel from Amiens.
Stephen Wigmore, chairman of the ethics committee of the British Society for Transplantation, said that teams in France, the United States and the United Kingdom are working on developing techniques to make face transplants a reality. "This is the first face transplant in the modern era," said Lane Hutchins, facial surgeon and CEO of "Face Savers - Facial Surgery Research Fund", a charitable foundation for medical research.
Hutchins said that while any medical advance should be celebrated, the face transplant in question was done while abandoning many rules of ethics and morality. "It was a 'quality of life' surgery, not a life-saving one, and it creates an ethical complication, as far as the transplant recipient and the donor families are concerned."
For news at the BBC
