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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."
Maybe now people like Jacqueline Saburido can have their lives restored to them.
Oh, FP?
HERE
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Brings a whole new meaning to the phrase "Your face, your ass - what's the difference?"
... 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.
I always thought Michael Jackson pioneered this technique years ago.
IAAL
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
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
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."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!
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."
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.
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.
You may well be right on that, but is imposing the penalty on a white justice when the penalty isn't really justifiable?
Remember, equality means treating everyone equally, and as a non-white this is exactly what I want. Discrimination that favours non-whites will breed resentment among whites, and I wouldn't blame them one bit for that.
Oh by the way, fuck political correctness
Cheers,
CD
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