Slashdot Mirror
Full Facial Transplant Is One Step Closer
Hugh Pickens writes "A Chinese medical team led by Shuzhong Guo of the Fourth Military Medical University in Xi'an has successfully completed the first transplant to include facial bone in a transplant on a man whose face was slashed by a bear. The Chinese graft included muscles, nerves, blood vessels, cartilage and skin and included an intact salivary gland, another first. Two years after the procedure, the man can eat, drink and speak, thanks to the gradual fusing of transplanted nerves and muscles with what remained of the patient's own. This transplant together with the another ground breaking transplant last year by French doctors that removed a huge tumor that had completely infiltrated and disfigured their patient's face, now sets the stage for a full facial transplant."
I wonder how many people would actually be willing to donate their face. It's one thing to donate blood or donate an organ when you die, but to donate part of or the entirety of what makes you most visibly recognizable? Even though the donor would be dead, the family might have issues with disfiguring the corpse.
No, it is not. There has been research and people of various races are not good at recognising people from another race. For example, westerners will look at hair colour as one of the parameter. Obviously, unless the hair is died, it is not a good parameter for distinguishing oriental people. As it turns out, various races use different sets of parameters to recognise individual people. If you're not trained in that, you'll easily conclude that they look alike. Witness testimonies where a witness is of a different race than the person he claims to recognise should be judged carefully.
Bert