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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."
those who had their faces burned would be better off. Am I right?
Maybe now people like Jacqueline Saburido can have their lives restored to them.
Oh, FP?
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...
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]
"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?"
...
This is an incredibly specious argument. Seriously, put a little thought into it.
OK, now that we've determined that you aren't willing to put thought into it, I'll do it for you. Why do we have such a long lifespan and low infant mortality rate nowadays? Modern medicine. Are you saying that we should drop this entirely, just so in one million years we might be slightly more likely to mate (in a 20 year life span, with no way of caring for the infants) than we are now (assuming same conditions)?
The greater good would be far, far worse if it weren't for this "large infrastructure". You're using the same argument anarchists use, that we shouldn't rely on a large infrastructure to live. Of course, if we get rid of the large infrastructure, we die, but at least we're independant!
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.
Use ISO 8601 dates [YYYY-MM-DD]
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.
First, that water went over the bridge with the invention of the bandage. We are by nature the animal that defies Nature through the use of technology.
By definition, our medical tools are part and parcel of the evolutionary process. Would you say that the birds are "cheating" because they used wings? Or that the lungfish were cheating by getting their oxygen straight from the atmosphere?
Second, we're not thwarting evolution. We're giving the victims their life back after accidents that Nature never intended. At what point did the Discover channel do a special on "the Drunk Driver's Place in the Ecosystem?" And what natural defense do you propose we evolve to counter this risk? Adamantium skeletons?
Third, if you've personally ever received any sort of serious medical intervention, then you're a raging hypocrite. An injection of any kind qualifies as "serious intervention." If you haven't received any serious medical attention, then you're either very young or rather sheltered. My guess would be both.
Last, and this is the point I really want to make, WHAT KIND OF FREAKISHLY UNFEELING JACKASS ARE YOU THAT THIS THOUGHT WOULD EVEN ENTER YOUR HEAD? Most of the candidates for this surgery are burn victims who survived a perfect glimpse of Hell, only to discover that young children run screaming from them in terror now, that even their families flinch before touching them.
Your job here is to sit down, shut up, applaud the surgeons who are dedicating their lives to alleviating suffering, and pray that nothing ever happens to you that would make you too terrified to look in the mirror.
Although, after a post like that, I would hope you'd avoid mirrors for a while anyway out of decent sense of shame.
He put his boots up on the table and made a face. "The sig," he smirked. "You can waste your life in search of the sig."
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
However, it was the phrasing of the question that was so provocative to me. It was very absolute: whether someone's identity is changed if their face changes. It's not a very nuanced question, and mine was not a nuanced response.
I think I'm more astonished by this than most people would be. I certainly don't equate my own face with my identity. Not coincidentally, probably, I also am very uninterested in hiding or changing my identity in any way. My identity is my self as I see my self--all the various public versions of my self that exist in other people's minds are secondary and not of great importance to me. My conception of "self" is a self that's solidly behind my facade--the outward facing part that other people associate with me is merely contingent. It occurs to me that many or most other people probably don't think this way.
This retard has no right to live.
Every human being has the right to live. and every human being made mistakes.
To kill a person just because he killed someone, or destroied someone's life, is revenge, not justice.
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.
"nobody, even God if you believe, has the right to terminate another human being's life
A little off-topic, maybe... But I've come to to the same conclusion regarding a nation's "soverign right" to wage war...
In other words, if it's right to pre-emptively strike another country on the basis of what it might do, then it's perfectly right for me to shoot someone in the parking lot for looking at me funny. Any reasonable being can agree that's not the case, so why the double-standard? Nations are just organisms that have people for cells, after all.
--Fesh
Kill -9 'em all, let root@localhost sort 'em out.
Every human being has the right to live? Heh. No living thing has any inherent rights. Such things are imagined by man, and bestowed by man.
Because of this, justice and vengeance are synonyms. So, it isn't right to kill a murderer, according to you? Hmm. How can it be right to imprison one, then? Or force them into psychiatric counseling? Such actions would take away their freedom, and since I, too, can speak out of my ass, "Every human being has the right to freedom!"
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