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Doctors at New York University this week announced "the first successful transplant of a partial face and an entire eye." And the road to getting there was both heartbreaking and incredible: In May at NYU Langone Health in New York City, the surgery was performed on a 46-year-old man who had suffered severe electrical burns to his face, left eye and left arm. He does not yet have vision in the transplanted eye and may never regain it there, but early evidence suggests the eye itself is healthy and may be capable of transmitting neurological signals to the brain. The...

Isabelle Dinoire, whose image became known world-wide after being given the first ever face transplant after her dog devoured part of her face, has died in France, according to media reports. Dinoire was left badly disfigured in May 2005 when her Labrador attacked her and ripped off much of her face. But less than a year later she became known world-wide when she revealed her new face after being given the first ever partial face transplant by surgeons at Amiens hospital. […] But last winter Dinoire became ill after her body rejected a new skin graft. As a result, she...

In an emotional get-together, a woman has met for the first time a man who received her late brother's face in a groundbreaking transplant. Rebekah Aversano visited Richard Norris at his Virginia home and stroked his face — which once belonged to her 21-year-old brother Josh. "Do you mind if I touch it?" Aversano asked during the emotional meeting filmed by "60 Minutes Australia'. The family of Aversano had donated the face of Josh to Richard Norris, who had suffered severe facial disfigurement after accidentally shooting himself in 1997 when he was 22. Norris, now 39, had undergone dozens of...

<p>BOSTON – Charla Nash never served in the military. She was horribly disfigured, not in combat, but in a 2009 attack by a rampaging chimpanzee. The Pentagon, though, is watching her recovery closely.</p> <p>The U.S. military paid for Nash's full face transplant in 2011 and is underwriting her follow-up treatment at a combined cost estimated in the hundreds of thousands of dollars, in the hope that some of the things it learns can help young, seriously disfigured soldiers returning from war.</p>

After hiding his face for 15 years, Richard Lee Norris has stepped into the spotlight for a book about the surgery that saved his life. Norris made headlines in 2012 when he received a full face transplant – the result of a 36-hour operation that swapped his scarred skin and shattered bones with tissue from a donor. Now he's sharing his story in "The Two Faces of Richard," a biography punctuated with never-before-seen black and white photos of his amazing transformation. "This book shows that it's possible to go through hell and come out on the other side," said Coos...

The Virginia man, who about 100 days ago underwent the most extensive face transplant surgery ever performed, has regained the ability to smell and taste, as well as what he called a sense of normalcy after 15 years of hiding. Richard Lee Norris, 37, on Tuesday credited the work of the University of Maryland’s plastic and reconstructive surgery team with ending his life in isolation. He said they helped him close out the routine he was forced to adopt in 1997, when a gun accident destroyed his upper and lower jaws, as well as his lips and nose. “For the...

After 20 hours of surgery, more than 20 surgeons, nurses and other medical professionals in a Boston hospital have given Charla Nash the new face she has waited for for more than two years. Nash was mauled by a chimp in February 2009 at her friend’s Stamford home. The pet chimp, named Travis, destroyed Nash’s eyes, ears, nose and mouth. It left her permanently blind. Doctors said it was a miracle Nash even survived. Soon after the attack, Nash was moved from a local hospital to the famed Cleveland Clinic, known for performing the first successful face transplant. At that...

It’s been nearly two years since Connie Culp underwent the world’s first near total face transplant — and in that time, she has made incredible strides. When Culp made her first public appearance in May 2009, her face was bloated and squarish, her speech was hard to understand, and her skin drooped in big folds. But thanks to the skilled hands of surgeons at the Cleveland Clinic, who performed the initial surgery, she is ready to face the world again with her head held high. “When you look back, I’ve come a long way,” Culp said.

A leading French surgeon says he has now effectively carried out a full face transplant after two operations in the same number of weeks. Professor Laurent Lantieri, who has performed three of the world's six partial face transplants, said every feature had now been transferred.

MILWAUKEE — The nation's first near-total face transplant has been done on a woman at the Cleveland Clinic, the hospital announced Tuesday. Reconstructive surgeon Dr. Maria Siemionow replaced nearly all of the woman's face — 80 percent — with that of a dead female donor in an operation a couple weeks ago. The patient's name and age were not released. The hospital plans a news conference Wednesday to give details. The world's first partial face transplant occurred in France three years ago on a woman who had been mauled by her dog. Two others have been announced since then —...

Face transplant 'double success' Successful results from two more face transplants will speed progress towards similar operations in other countries, say experts. The Lancet journal reported operations involving a bear attack victim in China, and a French patient with a massive facial tumour had taken place. The Chinese patient was given not just the lip, nose, skin and muscle from a donor, but even some facial bone. Specialists in London are working towards the UK's first transplant. Frenchwoman Isabel Dinoire became the world's first face transplant patient in 2005 after being savaged by a pet dog. She described the results...

SHE is house-hunting, planning a new career and her once-broken heart is filled with hope. Isabelle Dinoire knows that rebuilding her life will be a slow process. But, even though her scars are still livid, she can now look at the world with optimism. Barely two months ago, the 38-year-old French divorcee received the world's first face transplant and this exclusive photograph reveals the full extent of her remarkable transformation. Last May, she had a wide, tilted nose, a prominent chin and thin lips. Today, the donated face of suicide Maryline Saint-Aubert has given her a straight and narrow nose,...

TUCSON, Ariz. - The world's first face transplant recipient is using her new lips to take up smoking again, which doctors fear could interfere with her healing and raise the risk of tissue rejection. "It is a problem," Dr. Jean-Michel Dubernard, who led the team that performed the pioneering transplant in France on Nov. 27, acknowledged on Wednesday.

PARIS, Dec. 13 - It was a startling feat of medicine, the world's first partial face transplant. But in the weeks since the groundbreaking surgery last month, the operation has taken a back seat to a very public argument over the ethics of the operation and the psychological health of the 38-year-old recipient. The debate has pitted one doctor against another and sent tabloids in Britain into a frenzy. At least one member of the regulatory agency that approved the procedure, Dr. Emmanuel Hirsch, has called for an investigation into whether the surgeons rushed to be first, cutting corners to...

AMIENS, France, December 9, 2005 (LifeSiteNews.com) - Much controversy has been made over the first-ever face transplant surgery conducted in France on a 38-year-old woman Isabelle Dinoire who was attacked by a dog. Covered by the media in recent days, the surgery was performed November 26-27 in a hospital in Amiens. The controversy has revolved around two aspects of the operation and totally ignored a third - and the most disturbing of the controversies surrounding the operation. Ethicists and experts the world over have been discussing the need of the transplant recipient to take anti-rejection drugs for the rest of...

Dr. Jean-Michel Dubernard, whose decision to perform the world's first partial face transplant has placed him at the center of an ethical storm, leads a kind of double life. As a surgeon in Lyon, Dr. Dubernard, 64, has been a pioneer, developing techniques to transplant pancreas glands and other tissues, and organizing the international team that performed the world's second hand-forearm transplant in 1998. (The first was performed in Ecuador in 1964 before advances in drugs and microsurgery.) But Dr. Dubernard is also a politician, a former deputy mayor of Lyon who is one of the most powerful members of...

In urgent telephone calls and agonized e-mail messages, American scientists are expressing increasing concerns that the world's first partial face transplant, performed in northern France on Nov. 27, may have been undertaken without adequate medical and ethical preparation. Some scientists say they fear that if the French effort fails, it could not only threaten the life of the transplant recipient, a 38-year-old Frenchwoman, but jeopardize years of careful planning for a new leap in transplant surgery. "We've been working on the ethics and the science for some time, going slowly while we figure out immunology and patient selection criteria and...

New questions were raised yesterday over France's pioneering face transplant operation when a leading medical ethics professor said the surgery had been conducted with undue haste, as it emerged that both the donor and the recipient of the skin graft had attempted suicide. The medical team that carried out the 15-hour operation eight days ago was accused of ignoring ethical questions in the bid to be first, and of using a rival doctor's technique. The saga took a further twist when it became clear that the donor and the 38-year-old transplant patient had been involved in suicide attempts.

MARLY, France - The French doctor behind the world's first partial face transplant insisted Monday that his patient had not tried to commit suicide before she was maimed by her dog _ although a British newspaper said she had acknowledged it in an interview. The contradiction is one of the mysteries surrounding last week's groundbreaking operation that grafted a nose, chin and lips from a brain-dead donor onto the severely disfigured 38-year-old mother of two teenagers. The headline-grabbing case raised questions about the ethics of performing such a dramatic operation on someone who may have suffered psychological troubles. London's Sunday...

She was mauled by a pet Labrador in May, leaving her with severe facial injuries that her doctors said made it difficult for her to speak and eat. The dog was put down. http://news.yahoo.com/s/ap/20051205/ap_on_he_me/face_transplant_10