Posted on 12/06/2005 12:41:44 PM PST by neverdem
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 the French National Assembly.
"There's a big brain behind him and a steely will that is willing to confront massive criticism," said Dr. Thomas E. Starzl of the University of Pittsburgh, who performed the first successful liver transplants, in Denver.
In performing a face transplant on a severely disfigured 38-year-old woman, Dr. Dubernard has now entered one of the most disputed frontiers in transplantation science.
The transplants are extremely risky, and no one can say what a patient will look like afterward.
Critics have said that in rushing to be first to do a face transplant, Dr. Dubernard bypassed standard procedures to reconstruct the face of the woman, who was severely bitten by her dog last May. Dr. Laurent Lantieri, a rival transplant surgeon in Paris...
(Excerpt) Read more at nytimes.com ...
Roland Quadrini/Reuters
Dr. Jean-Michel Dubernard, above, at a news conference with a computer image showing details of the patient's face.
Dubernard's decision to give the woman an infusion of stem cells from the donor's bone marrow shortly after the face transplant in an effort to prevent rejection of the new face, a procedure they say is still experimental.
stem cell ping
Using adult stem cells isn't in itself unethical. And it appears a face fix was in order. [I wonder, when will the first attempt at brain transplant happen?... The whole higher brain, under the false assumption that the person is being given a new body, that is.]
Check the link on Graft-versus-host disease in comment 1. Unless they did ABO (blood group) and HLA (tissue antigen) typing before transplantation, I think this is very questionable. Add in the questions about the patients psychiatric state, and you have two extra red flags.
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