Woman has first face transplant

[Felix the Cat]

French Doctors Perform First Partial Face Transplant (http://www.latimes.com/news/science/la-113005face_wr,0,7112321.story?coll=la-story-footer&track=morenews)
LYON, France — Doctors in France said they had performed the world's first partial face transplant, forging the way into a risky medical frontier by operating on a woman disfigured by a dog bite.

The 38-year-old woman, who wants to remain anonymous, had a nose, lips and chin grafted onto her face from a brain-dead donor whose family gave consent. The operation, performed Sunday, was led by a surgeon already famous for a transplant breakthrough, Dr. Jean-Michel Dubernard.

"The patient's general condition is excellent and the transplant looks normal," said a statement issued today from the hospital in the northern city of Amiens where the operation took place. Dubernard would not discuss the surgery, but confirmed that it involved the nose, lips and chin.

"We still don't know when the patient will get out," he said. A news conference is planned for Friday.

Scientists in China have performed scalp and ear transplants, but experts say the mouth and nose are the most difficult parts of the face to transplant. In 2000, Dubernard did the world's first double forearm transplant.

The surgery drew both praise and sobering warnings over its potential risks and ethical and psychological ramifications. If successful -- something that may not be known for months or even years -- the procedure offers hope to people horribly disfigured by burns, accidents or other tragedies.

The woman was "severely disfigured" by a dog bite in May that made it difficult for her to speak and chew, according to a joint statement from the hospital in Amiens and another in the southern city of Lyon, whose doctors collaborated in the surgery.

Such injuries are "extremely difficult, if not impossible" to repair using normal surgical techniques, the statement said.

"For pushing the bounds of science, they are to be applauded, as long as they have got full informed consent from the patient and the donor's family," added Dr. Iain Hutchison, chief executive of the London-based Facial Surgery Research Foundation.

Scientists around the world are working to perfect techniques involved in transplanting faces. Today's best treatments leave many people with facial disfigurement and scar tissue that doesn't look or move like natural skin.

A complete face transplant, which involves applying a sheet of skin in one operation, has never been done before. The procedure is complex, but uses standard surgical techniques.

Critics say the surgery is too risky for something that is not a matter of life or death, as regular organ transplants are.

The main worry for both a full face transplant and a partial effort is organ rejection, causing the skin to slough off.

"It is not clear whether an individual could be left worse off in the event that a face transplant failed," said Dr. Stephen Wigmore, chair of the ethics committee of the British Transplantation Society.

Complications also include infections that turn the new face black and require a second transplant or reconstruction with skin grafts, perhaps even one or two years later. Drugs to prevent rejection are needed for life and raise the risk of kidney damage and cancer.

Such concerns have delayed British plans to attempt the operation. In France, ethics authorities rejected an application to try a full face transplant last year, but left the door open for a partial procedure involving the mouth and nose.

In the United States, the Cleveland Clinic is among those planning to attempt a face transplant.

The French surgery "doesn't change our plans," said Cleveland surgeon Dr. Maria Siemionow. "We are really looking for the right candidate," which she described as "severely disfigured patients which have already had the conventional treatment" and for whom a transplant is the last chance.

Dubernard, who is also a lawmaker in France's lower house of parliament, collaborated in the operation with the Amiens hospital's Dr. Bernard Devauchelle. Weekly news magazine Le Point reported that the recipient lives in Valenciennes, in northeast France, and that the donor's facial organs were removed in a hospital in Lille, about 60 miles from where the transplant was performed.

Dubernard also led teams that performed a hand transplant in September 1998 and the world's first double forearm transplant in January 2000.

The hand transplant recipient, New Zealander Clint Hallam, later had it amputated. Doctors said he failed to take the required drugs and his body rejected the limb.

The double-forearm recipient, Denis Chatelier from France, said in 2003 that he had regained "normal usage" of his hands and was even able to shave himself. His forearms were severed in a model rocket accident.

Doctors from Jinling Hospital in Nanjing, China, reported that in September 2003, they transplanted two ears, part of the scalp and other facial skin from a brain-dead young man to a 72-year-old woman with advanced skin cancer.

Four months later, there were no signs of rejection or tumor recurrence, but it is not known how the patient fared after that.

Doctors around the world have performed partial face transplants using the patients' own skin, but these don't require anti-rejection drugs.

[Jimbo Gomez]

Poor woman, getting such a horrible bite in the face.

[Felix the Cat]

Merci: her first word (http://news.telegraph.co.uk/news/main.jhtml?xml=/news/2005/12/03/wface103.xml)

The first word the woman given a pioneering partial face transplant uttered when she looked in a mirror was "merci", one of the surgeons who carried out the operation said yesterday.

Prof Bernard Devauchelle said his patient, Isabelle Dinoire, was allowed to see the results of the surgery when she regained consciousness 24 hours after receiving the nose and lips and part of the chin of a dead woman on Sunday.

He said the 15-hour operation to repair her face, which was badly disfigured when she was mauled by a labrador-cross "far surpassed" the expectations of the eight-strong surgical team.

"We were stupefied by the perfect integration of the patient's face with that of the donor's," he said.

Before the operation Miss Dinoire, 38, could barely eat, drink or talk. Just hours after the surgery she was able to do all three, Prof Devauchelle said.

However, the surgeon said it would take up to six months for her to regain proper feeling and movement in her new face. He also explained that the lips and nose would neither resemble the donor's nor the patient's face, as they were attached to a different bone structure.

"She will have to re-appropriate her face," Prof Devauchelle said.

The face of the donor, a brain dead woman, was transferred from Lille in a preserving liquid at four degrees centigrade.

The surgeons said the transplant required them to put back veins, arteries, muscles and nerves - some the size of a "string on the end of a runner bean".

Not only did the two women share the same blood group, but their skin colour, texture and thickness were deemed to be a "perfect match".

Some French doctors have accused the transplant team, overseen by Prof Jean-Michel Dubernard, of putting their desire to achieve a "irst"above the interests of the patient.

Critics have suggested that normal facial reconstructive surgery should have been attempted. Surgical teams in other countries, although technically ready, have taken a more cautious approach because of the psychological and ethical implications of such an operation.

But the transplant team insisted that they had respected French medical, ethical and legal requirements but had to act quickly because the patient's face was deteriorating.

"My philosophy, our philosophy, is that we are doctors and we have a patient with a very severe disfigurement related to a dog bite," Prof Dubernard said.

"It was extremely difficult, if not impossible, to repair with classical techniques of surgery."

Prof Dubernard added: "As doctors, if we have the possibility to improve (the condition of) our patient, that's what we can do."

Philippe Domy, the head of Amiens hospital, said: "We were in an exceptional situation that required an exceptional response."

The patient had received counselling before deciding to go ahead with the surgery and was warned of the huge media attention her operation would receive. She was aware of the relatively high risk of her body rejecting the new face - 10 per cent in the first year and up to 50 per cent within five to 10 years.

She was also informed of the health risks of taking immunosuppressant drugs for life, including the increased likelihood of contracting cancer. Extra precautions were taken in an effort to avoid controversy.

Under French law it is assumed that a person is happy to give their body to science unless he or she stipulates to the contrary.

However, due to the "exceptional situation" created by the facial transplant, the family of the brain-dead donor was consulted and gave approval.

After the dog attack doctors covered Miss Dinoire's face with a surgical mask to stop her seeing her horrific injuries when she looked in the mirror.

Yesterday Miss Dinoire's 17-year-old daughter said her mother was teased by locals in her home town of Valenciennes, northern France, after she was mauled by the dog in May.

"The hardest thing she had to put up with were the stares from other people when she went out," the daughter added.

"Some people even made fun of her. They didn't even know what had happened to her.

"They asked stupid questions, like whether she had avian flu."

The daughter, who wishes to remain anonymous, added that her mother, a divorced mother of two, had bought a smaller dog after the labrador-cross was put down against her wishes.

Prof Dubernard denied a French media report that the woman was attacked by the dog after she had passed out from having taken pills in a suicide attempt.

He said the woman had taken a pill to try to sleep after an argument with her daughter.

"She just woke up in the night - perhaps stepped on the dog - and was attacked."

The woman was examined by several psychiatrists in the lead-up to the surgery and "all these teams gave the green light," he said.

Prof Dubernard led teams that performed a hand transplant in 1998 and the world's first double forearm transplant in January 2000.

But he said this operation was far more complex and that the teams in Amiens and Lyons intended to carry more operations of this kind.

However, a total face transplant is not on the cards at present - the idea was recently rejected by France's medical ethics watchdog.

[Felix the Cat]

http://news.telegraph.co.uk/news/graphics/2005/12/03/wface03.jpg

I'm surprised a Labrador was responsible for this

[Felix the Cat]

(This story is getting bizarre...)

Revealed: tragic death of woman who donated her face (http://www.timesonline.co.uk/article/0,,2087-1903180,00.html)

THE woman whose nose, lips and chin were used in the world’s first face transplant had committed suicide, it was revealed last night.

The 38-year-old French woman hanged herself, doctors said. Her family allowed her face to be removed so that another woman with severe facial injuries would have the chance of a normal life.

Isabelle Dinoire, also 38, who has made medical history as the recipient, expressed her gratitude to the donor’s family yesterday for letting the operation go ahead.

In her first public comments since the surgery, Dinoire said that she had also tried to kill herself six months ago. It was while she was unconscious after an overdose that her dog had attacked her, leaving her with what she called “terrifying” injuries.

“I am very grateful to this woman,” Dinoire said. “I thank her family for giving their permission for this operation. I thank them from the bottom of my heart.”

Olivier Jardé, a professor of ethics at Amiens University hospital centre and who was involved in the preparations for the operation, said that the donor was brain dead when she arrived at hospital.

She was examined by doctors in the northern city of Lille where her features were later removed, Jardé said. He cited French law in refusing to identify her.

The face was grafted on to Dinoire in a 15-hour overnight operation that ended on Monday morning at Amiens, south of Lille. Yesterday Dinoire was able to admire the results.

“I have been looking at my face in the mirror,” she said from her hospital bed. “It is very impressive. They have given me my face back.”

Dinoire, an unmarried mother of two teenage daughters, admitted that during a sudden fit of depression she had taken an overdose of sleeping pills last May at her council flat near the town of Valenciennes. She declined to say what had prompted her suicide attempt. “It’s a secret,” she said.

Her comments contradicted a statement by her surgeon, Jean-Michel Dubernard, who last Friday denied a French media report that she had tried to kill herself. He claimed that she had taken a pill to try to sleep after an argument with one of her daughters and had just woken up when she was mauled — perhaps after stepping on the dog.

The confirmation that Dinoire had wanted to end her life reinforces an astonishing parallel with her donor’s state of mind, but is likely to stoke an ethical debate over the transplant.

Critics have emphasised the psychological toughness required to adapt to carrying a dead person’s face — and to cope with the intense public scrutiny after such pioneering surgery. Yesterday Dinoire said that her appearance after the attack had been so frightening that she had not hesitated — “not for a moment” — to go ahead and she had no regrets.

Speaking to The Sunday Times and a friend on her mobile phone, she praised the surgeons for having done a “magnificent” job.

[Felix the Cat]

http://medias.lemonde.fr/mmpub/edt/ill/2006/02/06/h_9_ill_738533_dinoire.jpg http://www.lefigaro.fr/photos/20060206.FIG0326_1.jpg http://www.lexpress.fr/reuters/une/2006-02-06T123248Z_01_NOOTR_RTRIDSP_3_OFRTP-FRANCE-GREFFE-20060206.jpg http://www.liberation.fr/obj/576/IMAGE_T5_57563.jpg

[SteamshipTime]

THE woman whose nose, lips and chin were used in the world’s first face transplant had committed suicide, it was revealed last night.

The 38-year-old French woman hanged herself, doctors said.
...
Dinoire, an unmarried mother of two teenage daughters, admitted that during a sudden fit of depression she had taken an overdose of sleeping pills last May at her council flat near the town of Valenciennes. She declined to say what had prompted her suicide attempt. “It’s a secret,” she said.


Glorious social democracy.

[Jimbo Gomez]

Glorious social democracy.


What does social democracy have to do with this medical breakthrough?

[SteamshipTime]

I am being somewhat hyperbolic, and per my quoted excerpt I'm not talking about the medical breakthrough. Rather, I consider the underlying facts to be among the fruits of a dissipated, decadent culture (i.e., social democracy): to wit, a face transplant from a 38-year old woman who hung herself to a 38-year old unwed mother of two daughters living in public housing who likewise attempted suicide and had her face ripped off by her obviously pathological dog.

Beyond sad and strange. Horrifying.

[Jimbo Gomez]

I'm not really a social democrat, but I think the problem goes way deeper than just posical democracy. The dependency on a nanny state is only a symptom of the sickness of society.

[Ambrosio Spinola]

Why would they inform everybody where they got that face transplant from? I thought such information was reserved much like that of other donnors.

[The Retard]

It will be good for people that get mauled by a dogs. Could they do it for children?

[SteamshipTime]

Perhaps the last vestiges of the European bourgeoise class wanted to impart their sense of tragic irony.

[Jimbo Gomez]

Dan, they transplanted a face, it's not as if the donor would be completely unrecognizable. But yeah, I think that might infringe on some medical ethics.

[Ahknaton]

This is cool. I remember when they did the first hand transplant. When do we get to see them do the whole face?

Also, some before and after shots of the donor and recipient would have been nice.

[OVERWATCH]

I wonder if the donor and the recipent were of the same race :p

Woman has first face transplant (http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/health/4484728.stm)


Surgeons in France have carried out the first face transplant, it has been reported.

The woman had lost her nose, lips and chin after being savaged by a dog.

In the controversial operation, tissues, muscles, arteries and veins were taken from a brain-dead donor and attached to the patient's lower face.

Doctors stress the woman will not look like her donor, but nor will she look like she did before the attack - instead she will have a "hybrid" face.

It has been technically possible to carry out such a transplant for some years, with teams in the US, the UK and France researching the procedure.

Skin from another person's face is better for transplants as it will be a better match than skin from another part of the patient's body, which could have a different texture or colour.

But the ethical concerns of a face transplant, and the psychological impact to the patient of looking different has held teams back.

Concerns relating to immunosuppression, psychological impact and the consequence of technical failure have so far prevented ethical approval of the procedure in the UK, though doctors here are fully able to perform transplants.

'Gravely disfigured'

The 38-year-old French patient, from the French town of Valenciennes, underwent extensive counseling before her operation.

The operation took place over the weekend in Amiens, and is believed to have lasted approximately five hours

The French magazine Le Point reports that the tissues, muscles, arteries and veins needed for the transplant were taken from a multi-organ donor in the northern city of Lille, who was brain-dead.

The operations were carried out by a team led by Professor Bernard Devauchelle and Professor Jean Michel Dubernard.

In a statement, the hospital said the woman had been gravely disfigured in the attack in May this year.

She has been unable to speak or eat properly since.

It added that the woman - who wishes to remain anonymous - was in "excellent general health" and said the graft looked normal

Live donors

Like any other transplant patient, the woman will have to take immunosuppressant drugs to help her body cope with the donated tissue.

Doctors working in the field say many could benefit from the procedure, including 10,000 burns victims in the UK.

Iain Hutchison, an oral-facial surgeon at Barts and the London Hospital, said: "This is the first face transplant using skin from another person."

But there are medical, and ethical, concerns of facial transplants.

Mr Hutchison, who is chief executive of Saving Faces - the Facial Surgery Research Foundation, warned blood vessels in the donated tissue could clot, the immunosuppressants could fail - and would increase the patient's risk of cancer."

Mr Hutchison added there were ethical and moral issues around donating facial tissue.

"Where donors would come from is one issue that would have to be considered.

"The transplant would have to come from a beating heart donor. So, say your sister was in intensive care, you would have to agree to allow their face to be removed before the ventilator was switched off."

Stephen Wigmore, chair of British Transplantation Society's ethics committee, said: "The extent of facial expression which will occur in the long term is unknown.

"The skin tends to promote rejection by the immune system very strongly and immunosuppression is likely to need to be kept at high levels for prolonged periods of time.

"It is not clear whether an individual could be left worse off in the event that a face transplant failed."

Mr Michael Earley, a member of the Royal College of Surgeon's facial transplantation working party, said: "If successful, this is a major breakthrough in facial reconstruction.

"It appears that this has been a partial face transplant incorporating the nose and lips; therefore issues relating to similarity in appearance between donor and recipient are unlikely to be a major problem.

"We wish the patient and the team a successful outcome and look forward to learning more about the details of the procedure which could be a major step forward for the facially disfigured."

[harjit]

I wonder if the donor and the recipent were of the same race :p

If not, she could get Hollywood roles as Racoon Woman.

[cryptoracist]

I feel like he's baiting me with these medical threads. :p

Anyways, thats pretty interesting because of this quote:
Doctors stress the woman will not look like her donor, but nor will she look like she did before the attack - instead she will have a "hybrid" face.

I can't wait to see what it looks like before and after...

[Felix the Cat]

http://www.nytimes.com/2005/12/06/science/06prof.html?ex=1162008000&en=dfa88d54ec9d8154&ei=5070

Dr. Jean-Michel Dubernard, whose decision to perform the world's first partial face transplant has placed him at the center of an ethical storm, leads a kind of double life.

As a surgeon in Lyon, Dr. Dubernard, 64, has been a pioneer, developing techniques to transplant pancreas glands and other tissues, and organizing the international team that performed the world's second hand-forearm transplant in 1998. (The first was performed in Ecuador in 1964 before advances in drugs and microsurgery.)

But Dr. Dubernard is also a politician, a former deputy mayor of Lyon who is one of the most powerful members of the French National Assembly.

"There's a big brain behind him and a steely will that is willing to confront massive criticism," said Dr. Thomas E. Starzl of the University of Pittsburgh, who performed the first successful liver transplants, in Denver.

In performing a face transplant on a severely disfigured 38-year-old woman, Dr. Dubernard has now entered one of the most disputed frontiers in transplantation science.

The transplants are extremely risky, and no one can say what a patient will look like afterward.

Critics have said that in rushing to be first to do a face transplant, Dr. Dubernard bypassed standard procedures to reconstruct the face of the woman, who was severely bitten by her dog last May. Dr. Laurent Lantieri, a rival transplant surgeon in Paris, has said that Dr. Dubernard and his team did not follow ethical and legal guidelines in performing the transplant.

Other transplant experts have raised questions about the woman's psychological stability and about Dr. Dubernard's decision to give the woman an infusion of stem cells from the donor's bone marrow shortly after the face transplant in an effort to prevent rejection of the new face, a procedure they say is still experimental.

Dr. Dubernard has responded that the operation, performed in Amiens, met all French ethical and legal standards and that the patient was examined by psychiatrists and found to be an acceptable candidate for a transplant.

He has also been critical of news coverage of the woman's operation.

Dr. Dubernard withstood similar criticisms after his team gave a new hand to Clint Hallam in 1998 and then was deeply embarrassed when reporters learned that Mr. Hallam had a criminal record and that he had lost his hand while in prison.

Further, Mr. Hallam turned out to be an unreliable patient, refusing to take the prescribed antisuppressant drugs to prevent rejection of the graft and to do the regular exercises needed to train his new hand. He demanded amputation of the new hand in 2001.

By applying knowledge gained in Mr. Hallam's case, Dr. Dubernard's team went on to perform successful hand-forearm transplants on two other patients. Each had lost both hands.

The hand recipient whose transplant has functioned the longest is due to celebrate his sixth anniversary in January.

Surgeons around the world have successfully performed a total of 30 hand-forearm transplants, including the three in Lyon, said Dr. Nadey Hakim of London, a team member who amputated Mr. Hallam's new hand.

In a telephone interview, Dr. Hakim described Dr. Dubernard as "big, pushy and at the same time friendly and kind."

In juggling his two careers, Dr. Dubernard says he usually commutes to Paris for two days each week to tend to politics in the French Parliament. On other days, he cares for patients at the Edouard Herriot Hospital in Lyon.

He describes himself as a workaholic and a chain smoker who has quit several times over the last 40 years. The last time was two years ago.

Dr. Dubernard was born at the hospital where he works. His father was a general practitioner and his mother a pharmacist. To friends and colleagues, he is known as Max, a nickname he was given in school for always giving his maximum effort, particularly in rugby.

An illness influenced Dr. Dubernard's decision to become a doctor. He was in awe of the surgeon who performed an emergency appendectomy on him when he was 11, he said, and he decided to become a surgeon himself.

As a medical student at the University of Lyon, Dr. Dubernard caught tuberculosis. After the illness disqualified him from military service, he went to Belgium to do research on liver and other transplants.

One day, his Belgian superiors received a call from Dr. Joseph E. Murray of Harvard, who had a sudden vacancy for a research trainee.

Dr. Dubernard volunteered, he said, but his Belgian hosts told him that at age 24 he was too young. When no one else accepted, Dr. Dubernard went to Boston.

He said he dedicated the face operation to Dr. Murray, who won a Nobel Prize in Medicine in 1990 for helping to perform the world's first successful organ transplant, a kidney in identical twins, in 1954. Dr. Dubernard was unmarried when he worked at Harvard and "left a lot of broken hearts when he returned to France," Dr. Murray recalled in an interview over the weekend.

In Lyon, Dr. Dubernard earned a doctoral degree, in part for work on xenotransplants, or transplants between species, among two kinds of monkeys. At age 37, he became chief of urology at the Herriot Hospital and at the University of Lyon.

He has served in the French Parliament since 1986. His interest in politics, he said, comes in part from memories of his family's involvement in the French resistance movement.

When Dr. Dubernard could not find a candidate for a hand transplant in France, he turned to his friend, Dr. Earl Owen of Sydney, Australia, who shared a goal of transplanting a hand. Dr. Owen had what the team believed was a good candidate in Mr. Hallam.

Dr. Dubernard said that he was not anxious before performing the operation to give Mr. Hallam a new hand or the one to give the woman a partial new face.

The reason, he said, was his confidence in the drills that his team of dermatologists, psychiatrists, nurses and other experts had followed in practicing each step of the complicated procedures.

"Once the preparations were done, I didn't worry anymore," Dr. Dubernard said. "But, after the transplants, it was another problem."

Dr. Dubernard said that when he went to sleep after Mr. Hallam's operation, he awoke from a dream, horrified that the new hand had turned black from acute rejection. It had not.

Doctors who have examined a number of the hand transplant recipients have been impressed with the psychological benefits the procedure offered the patients, particularly the double amputees. But experts debate the degree of nerve sensation and motor function that the recipients have regained from the transplants.

Dr. Dubernard said he was hesitant about performing the partial face transplant until he examined the woman in Amiens and saw the severity of the wounds. She had difficulty speaking and eating, as food fell from her mouth, he said.

Independent experts told his team that the wounds were "very difficult, if not impossible" to repair with standard reconstructive surgery, Dr. Dubernard said. But, he said, "We knew we could improve her life."

Dr. Dubernard said he slept only about three hours each night last week, in part because he worried about questions like: Would the arteries and veins clot, jeopardizing survival of the graft?

Now that certain danger points have passed, he said he is beginning to sleep better and longer. Still, he says he knows that the woman's immune system can reject the new face at any time during her life.

At a news conference in Lyon on Friday, Dr. Dubernard exuded confidence. He appeared bright-eyed, eyebrows continually raised, energetic, funny and quick to engage reporters.

He clearly is someone who loves the limelight, as he asserted himself over his more subdued colleagues.

Dr. Dubernard said in interviews this weekend that if a need arose, he would not hesitate to receive a new hand or face, or give approval for one to his three children or six grandchildren. He said he is divorced from his first wife, and lives with Dr. Camille Frances, a professor of dermatology in Paris.

Dr. Dubernard says that under French law he faces mandatory retirement from practice in two years and is not sure what he will do then.

A full-time career in politics is one possibility. Another is becoming a poet to express his wide-ranging interests, including a love of mythology.

[///M power]

:) France?
It was obviously a Muslim dog who did that.

[cryptoracist]

But I still don't get why they're giving him shit for doing this "controvesial" procedure. I mean if she was severely disfigured before then there's nothing he can do to make her look worst now... it can only get better from here... so why all the talk about her "psychological state"?

Anything he does would be an improvement IMHO we should let the creative thinkers of the world do their thing and be thankful that they are trying to improve on miedical science at all...

[OVERWATCH]

But I still don't get why they're giving him shit for doing this "controvesial" procedure. I mean if she was severely disfigured before then there's nothing he can do to make her look worst now... it can only get better from here... so why all the talk about her "psychological state"?

Anything he does would be an improvement IMHO we should let the creative thinkers of the world do their thing and be thankful that they are trying to improve on miedical science at all...

Probably the same old religious wingnuts who are opposed to organ transplants and blood transfusions.

[guy]

Yeah, I remember this story from last year (and later from a few months ago when her photos were published). But why is this in the news section rather than in the science and technology section?

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Isabelle_Dinoire

I feel like he's baiting me with these medical threads. :p

Anyways, thats pretty interesting because of this quote:

I can't wait to see what it looks like before and after...
Enjoy..

Before:
http://img.timeinc.net/people/i/2006/news/060206a/idinoire.jpg

After:
http://www.brabantsdagblad.nl/multimedia/archive/00070/No_name_70787h.jpg

Hopefully posting these pictures won't promote any insensitive remarks like "looks like the dog did her a favor". I think she just had a really bad hair day on pic #1.

[Felix the Cat]

This is cool. I remember when they did the first hand transplant. When do we get to see them do the whole face?

Also, some before and after shots of the donor and recipient would have been nice.
World's first hand transplant (1998) (http://www.thephora.net/forum/showthread.php?t=15218)