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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
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.
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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...
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... 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
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
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]
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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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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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.
...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
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!!!
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!
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.
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