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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."
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.
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/
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.
"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.