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First Face Transplant
mriya3 writes to tell us the BBC is reporting that surgeons in France have performed the first ever face transplant. The medical team, led by Jean-Michel Dubernard, transplanted live tissue to a 36-year old woman whose face had been destroyed by a dog. From the article: "It has been technically possible to carry out such a transplant for some years, with teams in the US, the UK and France researching the procedure. [...] But the ethical concerns of a face transplant, and the psychological impact to the patient of looking different has held teams back."
A live person is missing a face. A dead person doesn't need theirs any more. Where's the problem?
From the article:
"Where donors would come from is one issue that would have to be considered. "The transplant would have to come from a beating heart donor. So, say your sister was in intensive care, you would have to agree to allow their face to be removed before the ventilator was switched off. "And there is the possibility that the donor would then carry on breathing."
RTFA (I know, I must be new her), the face has to come from someone with a beating heart. The issue is that it has to be taken from someone on life support, who might then continue breathing on their own (without a face!) when the system is shut down.
"You're right," Fisheye says. "I should have set it on 'whip' or 'chop.'"
You obviously did not RTFA. The donor cannot be dead for this transplant to be successful. The donor would supposedly be someone close to death on life support. The surviving relatives of the "near deceased" would have to give the go-ahead to rip off the face of their beloved, assuming they will no longer need it. This could presumably lead to problems if a miraculous recovery of the donor happened or could adversly affect the donor's family if they see the face of their relative on someoene else's head. Those are the ethical concerns.
"If you put butter and salt on it, it tastes like salty butter." -Terry Pratchet, on Popcorn.
What if a person commits a crime and uses this surgery to escape identification and/or conviction.
The muscle and bone structure underneath the skin make up most of the identifying features of a person's face. While it won't be exact, with replacement skin you should look more like your "old self" than like the person who's donating the skin (save for color and blemishes).
Diplomacy is the art of saying, "Nice doggie!" until you can find a rock.
Technically, face transplants are not medically necessary. The surgery would definitely make the person feel better, but it is not life-saving such as heart, liver, lung, or kidney transplants. The side effects of immunosuppresants are still quite severe and perhaps life-threatening, since the immune system is getting shut down for the life of the patient. The question is whether a doctor can allow someone to take these risks for a non-life-saving procedure.
Living donors are not a problem because they're brain dead. So cutting off someone's face is scary; do so while they're still breathing (via ventilator) is really creepy. Yet, we pull hearts out of living people already so what's the face?
A NYC lawyer blogs. http://www.chuangblog.com/
This could be urban legend, but a few years back some Mexican drug lord tried to get a face transplant and didn't survive long.
Anyone else remember this?
Knowledge is how to play a game, intelligence is how to win, wisdom is knowing what game to play.
The face was taken from a LIVE donor.
The graft is living tissue that divides. The exterior layers are replaced by the basal layers, therefore I'm pretty sure it will show the same DNA for all time.
Exactly, From TFA:
Doctors stress the woman will not look like her donor, but nor will she look like she did before the attack - instead she will have a "hybrid" face.
Actually, I read about them considering doing this a few months back. Apparently your face looks like your face mostly due to the particular's of your underlying bones...so if you get a face transplant you actually look pretty much like you did before. Obviously some details are different...lips, etc. But its just skin, your face is still your face regardless of whose skin is on top of it.
What about maintenance? Supposing a poor person could afford a procedure, how on earth would they pay for prescriptions? Prices have skyrocketed in the past few decades, meanwhile, Merck spends over 60% of their budget on Marketing, mostly in telling the middle and upper classes what designer drugs they should ask their doctor about, as well as random kickbacks for doctors to prescribe their brand exclusively.
What about malpractice insurance? This is probably the #1 cause of inflated health care prices, our overly-litigious society is effectively killing services, private and governmental, while trial lawyers are cleaning up.
It's not all the government's fault, Captain Industry.
--- What
Not really a vaild argument.
Organ donors are generally set to give multiple organs when they donate. My Uncle died about 15 years ago and gave both Kidney's, part of his liver and muscle from his leg. If he would have "then carried on breathing" , he would have been screwed. They only take donation from people they are 99.99% sure are not going to wake up.
Along with taking a face, they may end up taking a lung or other organs. ALL donors HAVE to be alive before donating, it's a requirement.
IAMAD, however my wife is a Tramua Nurse who has assisted in preparing organs for donation.
Actually nip/tuck stole the idea straight from a Discovery channel documentary about face transplants that aired several months ago that I happened to Tivo. They stole all the elements of the girl who lost her face, including how the girl got her face ripped off.
In the documentary, this girl from India got too close to a machine and her hair got tangled up and literally ripped off her face. The showed the face and it looked gory... you could see the eye sockets, etc. The uncle or something put the girl's face in plastic bag and motorscootered for like 3 hrs to get to the closest hospital where they managed to reattach it. They showed her like years later, and considering the fact that she had her face ripped off, it wasn't so bad. She didn't look regular, but at least that poor girl didn't look horrendous.
The also showed some people in the documentary that looked like monsters. Literally like monsters, I can't describe it more. Like something you would see out of Doom 3, it was horrifying, and if you see these people, you will understand why face transplants are necessary. You can't live the way this person lives, with the completed destroyed face, because no one, and I mean no one, can stand to look at them. We're not talking about ugly people, we're talking about they look like walking, talking monsters. I'm a grown man, but when I saw this lady, I wanted to cry because that is no way to live a life. I would rather be on immunosuppresants for 15 years and die of kidney failure and be able to walk around in public rather than live the way this poor woman has been living.
I had to stop watching the show halfway because it was too much to bear, just too shocking, and I used to frequent alt.binaries.pictures.tasteless during the golden era where they had pictures of murder victims, people sawing dead bodies in half, etc. It was too horrifying for me, and I thank God to have never undergone something like that and hope that I never will have to, and to those people that require a face transplant, I wish them the best of luck in getting this face transplant thing working.
Having had a big swath of my forehead flesh disconnected from its nerves in a car accident, I can tell you that you get used to it. And, no, you don't want to pull it off. When it first happens, it's an injury and you do all you can to avoid touching it altogether. After it heals, you're used to not messing with it. By that point, you're accustomed to the way it feels anyway.
"A great democracy must be progressive or it will soon cease to be a great democracy." --Theodore Roosevelt
"Where donors would come from is one issue that would have to be considered. "The transplant would have to come from a beating heart donor. So, say your sister was in intensive care, you would have to agree to allow their face to be removed before the ventilator was switched off. "And there is the possibility that the donor would then carry on breathing."
This doesn't happen if the brain death testing is done properly. In Austraila one of the tests for brain death is that the person is disconnected from the ventilator for 20 minutes. If they breathe, they aren't truly brain dead. If you have proper criteria for brain death - A known cause of brain injury, meet several inclusion criteria (such as the aponea test mentioned above) and don't have any exclusion criteria that can look similar (eg recent anaesthesia/ low body temperature) then you can be considered as an organ donor.
In reality, people without brainstem function are very hard to keep alive on a ventilator, because the brain regulates alot of things. For example, the brain constantly releases a constant stream of anti diuretic hormone from the pituitary gland to regulate the total amount of water in your body. With brain death this stops and the kidneys will produce the maximal amount of urine (20+ litres/day), so fluid balance fails drastically.
I have seen less experienced people not understand the proper definition of brain death - I think that this is where you get the stories about turning off ventilators and people surviving. Brain death is a rapidly termainal condition. That is why so many heart transplants are done in the middle of the night - its hard to keep the donor alive until even the next morning.
Just FYI
Michael
There is no cryptographic solution to the problem where the intended receiver and the attacker are the same entity.