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Man Receives Artificial Face
jeffy124 writes: "Doctors in Kentucky have successfully implanted an artificial face. The surgery was required because of a rare fungal infection called mucormycosis in the man's sinus cavity that required removal his nose, eyes, cheekbones, upper jaw, and some teeth. The surgery required reconstruction of the mouth using tissue from his legs and facial bones were replaced with titanium bridging on which a prosthetic face is placed."
This sort of thing is by no means new - there are ample cases of facial prostheses in use today. It's not unknown to have cancer patients with similar, albeit less extensive, facial reconstruction necessary after surgery. The process is pretty similar, you implant magnets in the remaining bone structure, or attach them to a titanium superstructure implanted in the bone if the defect is very large, and attach a silicon prosthesis using those.
There really are some amazing feats being performed every day by the medical profession. People should read more or at least watch the Discovery Channel on occasion, then they wouldn't be as surprised by things like this make CNN.
This type of thing makes me think that the government should get that great big stick out their collective butts and let embryonic stem cell and controlled cloning continue. Now, whilst I don't care to have genetically identical copies of myself running around wouldn't it be great if we could grow this dude another face and graft it back on? Wouldn't be perfect for sure, but it would be much better than a silicone prosthetic. Not to mention that heart disease, liver disease et. al. patients could greatly benefit. When the government throwing up road blocks to this sort of thing they are merely hurting people, and delaying the inevitable.
Then there's the "when is an embryo a person" debate that is best left elsewhere...