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Surgeon Says Face Transplants a Reality
Aspherical Cow writes "A New York Times Magazine article about how a London surgeon is planning on performing an experimental full-face transplant. The face would be harvested like any other donor organ and used on a disfigured person. Lots of issues of identity come up with something like this, but they say that this won't turn Nicholas Cage into John Travolta."
FP! oh, and the link is broken. nytimes is suposed to be followed by '.com'.
"A language that doesn't affect the way you think about programming, is not worth knowing" - Alan Perlis
those who had their faces burned would be better off. Am I right?
This really is good news! I want one!
:(
This face has a few holes in
Maybe now people like Jacqueline Saburido can have their lives restored to them.
Oh, FP?
Face it, it's just another body part.
Maybe $$$exyGal can get a face transplant to make him look like a girl!
HERE
Check out Chad's News
Brings a whole new meaning to the phrase "Your face, your ass - what's the difference?"
Actually, I can't see how there would be any identity issues...I haven't read the article, but I can't imagine that anything would be transplanted besides the skin (and maybe some cartilage). The recipiants original bone structure would remain the same...
Imagine this...
You owe people a great deal of money and they send the "heavies" round, but you've already died in an acident.
Someone else has got your face now & the heavies recognise you. Not likely to happen to anyone here, but it could happen in the real world.
And another thing, how would you pass facial biometrics at US airports if the previous face was from a criminal?
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I wonder if I can get someone else's really nice face....I wouldn't mind being a Brad Pitt. Or for that matter, Jennifer Anison (heheh). But seriously, I wonder what the availability of donor faces will be like, should this become a more mainstream reconstructive surgery practice. I'm sure there will be some kind-hearted, altruistic donors out there, but enough to meet the likely demand? I want to look nice for my funeral.....with a face.
[este]
... transplants that are going to make a lot of money.
It's the scalp transplants that will make bazillions. Just think, you can get a whole new type of hair or just have your scalp cloned and slice out the male pattern baldness.
I would pay for that.
A lot of study has been put into what beauty really is. If you look at it from an evolutionary point of view, it's to show us which mates would best carry our genes.
When you change someone's face, you can't help but wonder if you're throwing a wrench into a system thats evolved over so many thousands of years. This argument would apply not only to this, but plastic surgery and what not.
It seams every day, medical technology is weakening the race more and more by causing people to depend on a large infrastructure to survive. At what point do you draw the line between leaving people out in the cold for the greater good or helping them?
Cthulhu Saves.
I always thought Michael Jackson pioneered this technique years ago.
IAAL
Apparently everyone who has ever posted a story on this topic, hasn't seen John Woo's: Faceoff..
In the movie, they not only switched skin, they also put "bone structure mimicking" masks on to the characters, so that they would look like each other. That's the miracle, not the switching of the skin. Skin, is skin, is skin.
If you get a skin transplant from your ass, to replace burn or scar tissue, it doesn't look like an ass...
0110100100100000011000010110110100100000011000100
Until the New U becomes possible?
Do have to commit carousel for reminding everyone of that movie?
If you could be told what you can see or read, then it follows that you could be told what to say or think - BoC
Quietly assinate Bill Gates
Pop over to the nearest face transplanting clinic
Shock the world when Bill Gates announces MS are giving up software development and releasing the source to the public
Do not try to read the dupe, thats impossible. Instead, only try to realize the truth
What truth?
There is no dupe
Giving a burn victim a face isn't throwing a wrench into evolution.
Too lazy to login. Damn making new profiles for nightly builds of Phoenix.
Never! How can you possibly suggest a lack of objectivity? Why, those seven stories in a row about Taco's brother's cool new car stereo were fascinating!
Seriously dude, it's nice for some of us non-Americans to see news from someplace other than Hometown USA for a change.
That crack about "Parramattadingdong" was kinda funny though. Heh.
up above the clouds so high, like i'm sitting in a tree with a child. twinkle twinkle little knife, how i wonder who i are.
see what happens when you post when you're drunk and struck out at a club!
"You never want a serious crisis to go to waste." - Rahm Emanuel
Its a condition called "torsonic polarity symdrome." It's a birth defect that I think we all know atleast one person who has it.
You can read more about TPS here.
True, death is not the worst that could happen to you. But I feel she needs more than just a face transplant.
At least it's a start.
*sigh*
Use ISO 8601 dates [YYYY-MM-DD]
If this were done on Ms Rosen, what would we call her? Faceless minus one?
"Smoking helps you lose weight - one lung at a time" -- A. E. Neumann
when someone tells you "you've got a face like a chimpanzee", you may really have a chimpanzee's face?
I'm sure some joker will claim that a face has a soul or some crap... :P
That musta been where Bin Laden hid for so long. On the WhiteHouse security staff as a stiff looking blonde guy. You know, the one who kept complaining about his pay.
I wonder how the human brain and psyche deals with seeing a different face in the mirror after years of strengthening a connection between the natural face and the "I".
If you outlaw the law, only criminals will have laws
about Jacqueline.
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organ thieves wouldn't even bother
<B>note to self:</B> <I>post as html</I>
Why in the world does anyone think that identity depends upon someone's face? Are people really that simple-minded?
Also, from the article:
I'm no more reluctant to donate my face for organ harvesting as I am my liver or kidneys. That is to say, I'm not reluctant at all.To the people who've asked about how much the recipient would look like the donor:
However, later in the article it's mentioned that more complicated procedured could harvest some of the cartilage and bone as well as the skin and muscle. I imagine that eventually they could probably come very close to recreating someone's face on someone else, so the idea isn't completely far-fetched. Still, though, our ability to recognize a face is still somewhat of a mystery, although it's understood that our brains put together a great many different subtle clues. My point is that even though we see faces as near monolithic and emminently identifiable structures, the truth is that even a small differences in muscle or bone structure might make a large difference in the overall recognizability of the face. So, I suspect that a surgeon would probably have to be intending to duplicate someone's face via a transplant in order to achieve such an effect.I'm serious. Is John Holmes' still available?
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I can get my :-| turned into a ;-)!
[este]
'(Score:-1 Troll)' huh? Funny how these posts never get modded up to like '(Score:5 Insightful)'! Maybe Michael has given away /. subs to his entire family and every one he went to school with? ;)
Last year, I attented some autopsies at my university (neighter as the one lying on the board nor as an active medic). This has been a great opportunity to see how things are inside your body. The routine of an autopsy includes the opening of the skull and the inspection of the brain. The face remains intact (it is turned over - this can be imagined literally). When the procedure is over, you won't see from the front that the face has been moved.
Anyway, this cannot be copied over 1:1 but it gives you a hint that transplanting faces it not voodo science or (ony) hollywood. I guess the 'commercial' market for transplanting faces exceedes many other types of organs.
More stories about *New Zealand* sheep farmers, that's what I reckon! [Insert obligatory Kiwi+Sheep joke here] Ahhh, sweet, sweet alcohol...
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You've wasted all the steam.
Do a Google search for Michael and the censorware project. You will be shocked. Michael was an asshole long before Slashdot. It is hard to imagine Malda being able to find anyone more smarmy.
Perhaps the worst that could happen to him is what's happening now - that he is alive and facing the fact that he was responsible for destroying her life [mind you, she seems to me a very spirited woman. Makes me proud of humanity.]
Do you really think he'd commit the same mistake, assuming he's well-adjusted and has a functional conscience? I didn't think so either. Every moment of the rest of his life will be weighed down by chains of misery.
Also check out her official website.
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We ran this story yesterday over on Sci-Fi Today with lots of extra info links. You can get SciFi Today headlines added to your Slashdot homepage here.
Now all of the
<A HREF="http://www-dept.usm.edu/~engdept/lrrh/inven
versions of the tale</A> will end up bad
The underlying skeleton and musculature of a face is just as important as the skin. Someone with a square jaw will still have it, even if the translpanted face didn't... Someone who is perpetually angry will still look angry even if the donor was not...
From the article: 'But what we're proposing is taking the skin envelope with or without some muscle. So if I were to transplant my face onto you, it would look much more like you than me, because the skin envelope is elastic. It would redrape around your bone and cartilage structure.
The only way to truly get someone else's face on your body would be to transplant the entire head.
I'm sure that Michael Jackson has already bought his plane ticket to London for this one! Now, I wonder what (who'll?) he'll look like NEXT week?
What about the immune system? Won't the face get rejected?
Wacko should have waited, now he's all messed up.
Bearing in mind that a tissue match can sometimes go across ethnicities would people consider mixing and matching skin envelopes of different shades for cosmetic purposes?
On the other hand, the scarring would probably land the recipient ostracised from the conservitave community.
...Slashdot discussed this already here, and that was a dupe of an even earlier discussion. Of course, these are from three or four months ago, and they were based on a different article. So it's not really a dupe, just sorta.
My Greasemonkey scripts for Digg &
To a certain degree, you're right, but differences in skin do exist, depending on body location.
Some skin is hair-bearing, some has different sweat glands, some is thicker, and some has more or fewer nerve endings. For instance, the skin on your elbows has far fewer nerve endings than the skin of the lip.
It sounds like the surgeon is simply doing a large, complex skin graft... that's something burn surgeons have been doing for years. Burn surgeons use a device called a dermatome... in essence a large electric shaver that you can set to shave off very precise depths of skin (to thousandths of an inch) to achieve a split-thickness graft. It's worth noting that skin grafts for burn victims are often meshed to cover a larger area (if you are burned >95% of your body, there isn't much to work with, so you have to make every bit count). The cosmetic results are nowhere near normal skin, but the primary purpose of a graft in a burn patient is to reestablish the protection that intact skin gives you. Absence of skin not only makes you extremlely vulnerable to death from infection, it also causes you to evaporate off enormous amounts of fluid, resulting in rapid dehydration. Cosmesis is often secondary to simply saving a person's life... it's not pretty, but it works. If you were burned, and your ass was spared, you can be damned sure the burn surgeon would harvest the bejeesus out of your ass to cover the rest of you...
I'd be interested to know how he's selecting his patients, and whether he'll do these transplants on smokers. There are some plastic surgeons that won't do skin grafts on a smoker, since the act of smoking can actually lower your capillary oxygen transport enough to endanger the survival of a skin graft.
I'd also be interested in knowing the surgical technique he's planning on using to harvest the skin. Clearly he'll have to do it by hand, use a bit of microsurgery to reconnect the vessels... I can see this being a looong procedure.
I'd probably donate my face, if someone else needed it and I didn't (I'd donate it, just like any other "organ"... and their different bone structure should destroy any resemblance).
Now whether someone would actually *want* my face... wow, I don't know... they'd have to be pretty desperate...
Even if a man chops off your hand with a sword, you still have two nice, sharp bones to stick in his eyes.
Mr Doctor might get a visit by the US gov't on account of the millions they just spent on facial recognition software in airports...
First of all, to even get a donor face, you'd have to take it from a dead donor (Doh, but it's not like with kidneys.. where you can give one and still live a normal.. or at least semi-normal life) And think of how reluctant the loved ones of said donor might be to transplant a face.. even though it wouldn't really be transforming him into the other guy... you can still see how a family might react..
Excuse me, I don't mean to impose, but I am the ocean
Hey,
A New York Times Magazine article about how a London surgeon is planning on performing an experimental full-face transplant.
You know, that this is possible was announced months ago.
I read it here first.
Michael
"Goodness me, how unlike the FBI to abuse the trust of the American public." -- The Onion
Does this take some of the sting out of the old insult "So, what ya gonna do for a face when the monkey wants his bum back?"
excuse me while i vomit all over my keyboard. this is just too revolting.
The good thing was that I looked better -- not like a kid.
The bad thing is that my personality don't fit with my face. I look quite tough now... you might not want to start a fight with me -- but I'm quite laid back and caring. I have problems like everyone else, but I'm a generic nice guy. (Except for religion, I'm a hard line atheist and feel physically sick after I tear som poor religious guy's arguments to bloody pieces.)
And this was personal enought that it will be posted as AC.
He has vitiligo.
This gives a whole new meaning to the term "saving face".
There may be hope for Bush (father & son) yet.
You aren't remembered for doing what is expected of you
For me a face transplant isn' enough. I want a total body transplant! I would like a body that is 10 years younger than the one I have now, and fully functional! It would also be interesting to try what it is like to be a woman for a change.
-- Cheers!
and to prove it, the picture accompanying the post is of Taco.
Jolly Hockey Sticks !
I Volunteer, What ?
I'll bring the strong rope, or at least some elasitated smalls and you can provide the plan, wot ?
eh, ok, I'll be Bill - Rather ! - Wot ! heehaaw...
A slashdotting - you get the stick first and then the carrot !
I think you ranted a bit too hard there - there was no reason to get so damn frantic about this.
People go through hell on a daily basis and live to tell the tale.
Stop being so f'in melodramatic.
Sure - theres' injustive in the world every-which-where you look, but moping about it solves f-all !
Just learn to help yourself and those around and you'll be ok.
A slashdotting - you get the stick first and then the carrot !
Holy beejeezus, they can transplant hearts, lungs, livers, reattach limbs and now transplant faces. When are they going to get the transplant that really matters - I want my 18" porno dick. I mean really, wouldn't it be a happier world if we just cloned a porn star a few million times and instead of having to be trying to right shareware so I can buy a status car, and a status house, I could just buy myself a porno dick transplant and be happy living in a shack!
This is my sig.
Is this just a little bit creepy to anyone else? I mean, come on. A whole new face? That's just fucked up.
I suppose it would have it's uses though. Michael Jackson can finally stop having his nose done, ugly girls around the world will finally have hope of getting a date to the prom, President Bush can get himself a face that doesn't look like that of a simpleton, and good ol' Osama can use this as the ultimate way to hide from us.
Wait. Check that last statement. Honestly, how hard is it to find a 6' Arab attatched to a kidney dialysis (?sp) machine?
I can see it now. "Yes doctor, I was thinking of the Clarke Gable look, but then I broke down and decided that I'd like to have the face of Harvey Korman. Can I get his voice, too? I've always wanted to pull off a good Great Gazoo inpression at parties..."
Blog Prophyts - Right On, Man
I call dibs on Joe Millionaire's face....that way I can definitely get some women!!
Defender of Microsoft and Communism!!!
And as to the role of beauty in evolution, what it really illustrates is the evolutionary arms race between the cheaters and cheater-detectors (to steal the paradigm from Richard Dawkins, and from game theory in general.) There is a certain threshold where it would be more energetically economic to simply pretend your genes are good. So early in evolution, maybe there really was a 1:1 correspondence between a pretty face and good genes. Thereby, a mechanism would evolve for potential mates to use a pretty face as criteria. But when that energy threshold is reached where it costs less to just code for a pretty face than to actually ensure that one's genes are good (thereby destroying the connection between a pretty face and good genes) a new mechanism would likely evolve for potential mates to detect this mismatch. The cheaters would continue to find ways not only to pretend they have good genes but also to pretend that they are not faking it, and the cheater-detectors would continue to find ways to tell otherwise. The face might actually really evolved this way (in the same way that peacocks evolved ridiculously flamboyant plumage and humans evolved a purely hydrostatic, non-bony penis) and I think this is all discussed in The Selfish Gene by Richard Dawkins but I could be wrong.
It's called beer. Drink enough of it, the ugliest face will be transplanted with that of a supermodel.
Warning: may induce vomiting and only lasts 3 hours.
Ergonomica Auctorita Illico!
Lots of issues of identity come up with something like this...
No, lots of tissues of identity come up.
Want to talk? ashaver AT pdx DOT edu
Whoa. Are you done now?
Rob
This was reported earlier in This Is London: http://www.thisislondon.com/news/articles/3609267? source=Evening%20Standard. No reg required ;-).
This place is sicker than i thought. Yes, this is very very sad, and I won't forget this picture anytime soon either...
Listen kike, the fact is WHITE MEN are disproportionately represented on death row, NOT blacks or mestizos. The system is strongly biased against White males, just look at the selective enforcement of hate crime laws against White men. The reason why there are so many blacks and mestizos in jail is because they are violent and prone to criminality, it's not due to institutional racism or any other bullshit jew theories.
I would think that a huge problem regarding face transplants would be getting the family to go along with it.
There is a lot of importance attached to having an open casket funeral, and for a lot of people there is a significant need to see and identify the body in order to accept that that particular person is gone. An anonymous body, or an urn full of ashes just doesn't cut it for most people. Particularly when there has been a serious accident.
Removal of the face will make such things impossible. Mourners will not be able to come and see the face of the decased, this makes it more difficult to accept.
I had a friend of mine die in an airplane crash. I refused to believe that he was dead until I saw the body. Even then, I had trouble accepting it because although they rebuilt most of his face, it was pretty badly messed up, and they had to put sheer veils over the casket so you couldn't look too close.
A mortitian once told me a story about someone who had died when their head was crushed. Normally this would make an open casket funeral impossible, however since this person was into motorcycles, they placed his helment where his head should go, put some black paper behind the visor, and had the casket open.
If people are willing to go to these lengths, a facial transplant isn't going to go over too well with the next of kin all that often.
With other organs, there is little or no distinguishable difference. Even the eyes can be donated, and the difference fixed up so that you generally can't tell. The entire face however is going to cause problems for a lot of people, and psyhological need to see the deceased one last time.
There is a civil war coming in the United States. Remember which side has most of the guns
So there won't be any more really crappy movies coming out because of this? What are we going to do?
--"The perfect example of the man of action is the suicide." - William Carlos Williams
Has anyone seen Jermaine recently? (Didn't think so.)
I think of it more like this... Do I have the right to go shoot the guy that runs the local gun store because I'm not well liked in the neighborhood and I think that he might sell a gun to someone that hates me?
It's not enough to bash in heads, you've got to bash in minds. - Captain Hammer