Woman's Voice Restored After Larynx Transplant

mvar writes "A woman in the US is able to speak for the first time in 11 years after a pioneering voicebox transplant. Brenda Jensen said the operation, which took place in California, was a miracle which had restored her life. Thirteen days after the surgery she said her first words: 'Good morning, I want to go home.' It is the first time a larynx and windpipe have been transplanted at the same time (image) and only the second time a larynx has ever been transplanted. In October, surgeons at the University of California Davis Medical Center removed the larynx, thyroid gland and 6cm of the trachea from a donor body. In an 18-hour operation, this was transplanted into Ms. Jensen's throat and the team connected it to her blood supply and nerves. Thirteen days later, she was able to speak her first croaky words and is now able to talk easily for long periods of time."

Comments

And so ends

[Anonymous Coward]

The happiest 11 years of one man's life.

Re:This raises questions:

[I8TheWorm]

She sounds like James Earl Jones now. The good news is she also sounded like him before.

Human beings are closer to being an idea

[h00manist]

If every part of anyone's body can be replaced, and even completely transfigured and upgraded for various other better parts, what is a human being?

Re:so her voice is different now?

[Locke2005]

Sure, but first you'd have to kill Bruce Willis and steal his larynx...

On a more serious note...

[Myji Humoz]

This is a seriously amazing time to live in, as multidisciplinary medical research teams are finding ways to give patients second chances at a relatively normal life. I can't imagine not being able to speak again for the rest of my life, (seriously, try taking a vow of silence for a single day) but I'm glad that the pool of "horribly life changing events without a cure" is getting whittled down bit by bit. Kudos to the research and operations team, and best of luck to the patient.

Re:On a more serious note...

[unkiereamus]

I work in (real) medicine, I'm a fervent believer in it, and I use the phrase "Big Pharma", not to degrade the medical practices, but rather the business decisions.

My favorite example is the drug Zofran, it is the gold standard in chemo anti-nausea meds (with some arguments to be made for pot, but I'll not get into that.). We're talking the chemo patients who haven't been able to keep any food down for a week, and nothing else worked, unless they had particularly good insurance, Zofran was the last option, and it almost always worked...the reason it was the last choice is that it was sold for a bit over a thousand dollars a dose.

When it came off patent, and the generic manufacturers got started on it, would you care to guess how much they were selling it for?

Go ahead, guess.

Nope, you're wrong, about a dollar fifty a dose.

Now, I can have some sympathy for the argument that they need to recover the R&D costs, but due to what amounts to legal maneuvering, they managed to extend their patent for basically 15 years from FDA Approval to it coming off-patent...Did they really need 15 years of about a 70,000% markup?

That's my favorite example, but it's far from the only one.

Re:Donor body?!?!

[Trevorm7]

If the donor body was able to talk, we would have a much bigger problem to worry about...

Re:so her voice is different now?

[Abstrackt]

That'll be difficult. I hear he dies hard.

Re:Oh noes!

[the linux geek]

"Real females" vs "trannies." How tactful.

Re:Oh noes!

[Anonymous Coward]

So is "cracker" or "whitey" or "nerd" or "douche" and yet nobody gets their dick all bent out of shape for those things. Maybe these trannies just need to grow a pair of balls.

its a good thing but its still creepy

[circletimessquare]

when you receive a donor liver, kidney, lung, etc. from a donor, it's invisible. but a donor's voice?

it's just so personal

you open your mouth, and out comes the voice of someone else, who is dead

creepy!

of course its still a wonderful gift, but its just a creepy wonderful gift, that's all i'm saying

Re:This raises questions:

[Kilrah_il]

Talking needs both the suitable anatomy and the right "circuitry" (i.e. brain connection). While we may be able to implant a suitable larynx, the animal lacks the suitable brain connection for two reasons:
1) There was no evolutionary push to develop it, since there was no suitable anatomy (assuming the anatomy and neuroanatomy develop together).
2) There was no push for the brain circuits to develop in the animal's life, in the same way that a deaf person will not be able to hear properly, even with a hearing aid implantation (a cochlear implant), if he didn't hear anything in the first few years of his life.

Re:Oh noes!

[Locke2005]

Thank you for the wiki reference. I learned 2 things today. (The other thing was that you should never google the word "tranny", especially at work.)