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Italians Perform Groundbreaking Full Jaw Transplant
statikuz writes "According to BBC News, Italian surgeons have performed the world's first complete jaw transplant. In eleven hours, the surgeons replaced a man's cancer-ridden jaw with a bone from a deceased donor; the donated jawbone was sterlized and stored at -196C to fight rejection, and "The current patient is said to be doing well.", says Professor Giuseppe Spriano, leader of the surgery team at the Regina Elena hospital in Rome."
Jay Leno is sleeping with a loaded shotgun.
Just in case.
www.eFax.com are spammers
When you lose your jaw, and then you get a second jaw from a cadaver, everything you do with that new jaw seems more satisfying than before, because you realize how ephemeral your lower jaw really is. At any moment you might lose it again, so you want to enjoy every moment to its fullest.
I bet right now this guy is chewing on the sweetest, juiciest Red Man chewing tobacco he's ever tasted!
Why does a jawbone need to be organic? Couldn't an artificial one be made of titanium or something?
It can. My dentist was installing metal (I think titanium) jaw part replacements into guys wounded in Vietnam. The problem is that the thermal and mechaincal properties of bone and titanium (or any metal) are very different. This leads to a lot of pain with slight temperature changes, mechanical shock like chewing, and so on. It's best to replace body parts using materials that are as similar as possible to the original. You can't get much closer that bone-for-bone.