Ethical Concerns on Face Transplant Grow

NY Times ^ | December 6, 2005 | MICHAEL MASON and LAWRENCE K. ALTMAN

[neverdem]

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 indications," said Dr. L. Scott Levin, chief of plastic and reconstructive surgery at Duke University Medical Center. "This flies in the face of everything we've tried to do."

The scientists' worries stem in part from the execution of the surgery, and in part from news reports over the weekend that called into question the patient's emotional state.

Dr. Maria Siemionow, director of plastic surgery research at the Cleveland Clinic, who has been preparing to perform a full face transplant, said that the way the transplant was conducted appeared to conflate two experimental protocols: the transplantation of facial tissue and the infusion of stem cells from the donor bone marrow into the patient in an attempt to prevent rejection of the new face.

The first procedure, although untried until now, has been well studied, and the microsurgical techniques involved are commonplace. But the second has been successful in human subjects only rarely and only recently. While pilot studies do suggest that an infusion of stem cells from the donor can help produce "chimerism" in humans, a state in which foreign tissue is tolerated by the body with comparatively little or no suppression of the immune system, it is far from standard...

[BikerNYC]

Ethical concerns about getting a new face? Go ask Mary Tyler Moore about such things. She has gotten a few new faces.

[Semper Paratus]

Will 'ugly' people want 'pretty' faces as elective surgery?

[bkepley]

In other words it's a typical Frog move, trying to
be first for France.

[RightResponse]

Could you imagine getting Hillary's mouth?

[E. Pluribus Unum]

Patching a woman's face with enough living tissue so she can close her mouth - bad.

Killing fetuses for their stem cells - good.

[RightResponse]

Or worse...Monica Lewinsky's!??

[EagleUSA]

I hear Nazi Pelosi is looking for a new face....

[Vicomte13]

Sounds to me like a bunch of folks bitter that someone else did it before they did.

[bkepley]

Sounds to me like a bunch of folks bitter that someone else did it before they did.

I'll give you that, if it turns out to be a success.

[GovernmentShrinker]

That exact point was made in an article I read yesterday, about a French doctor who was criticizing this -- he had clearly been planning to be the first, and was pissed that somebody else broke the rules (which I gather he had a hand in making) and beat him to it. The patronizing talk from doctors quoted in this article is disgusting.

[US admirer]

I wonder if you could ever get the taste out of it?

[finnman69]

Imagine the possibilities for aging Hollywood Surgery junkies?

[zerosix]

The French caught doing something unethical.

[RightResponse]

If she had her vagina transplanted on her face, then would it be sex?

[highlander_UW]

I think the real problem here is that the NYT has an article about ethics. Did they outsource the writing?

[Veto!]

said Dr. L. Scott Levin, chief of plastic and reconstructive surgery at Duke University Medical Center: "This flies in the face of everything we've tried to do."

An unintentional pun?

[BikerNYC]

If she had her vagina transplanted on her face, then would it be sex?

No, but it would be if it were transplanted on my face.

[RightResponse]

Well stated, and in true Biker fashion....

[Investment Biker]

I am tired about hearing "ethical concerns" from doctors. Try to tell someone without a face that they can't have one because of their ethical concerns, what a bunch of BS. The doctors in this country have turned into a bunch of elitist that control our health. In the founding papers of our country the founders talk about LIFE, LIBERTY, and the pursuit of HAPPINESS. But first we have to ask a doctor if he has any ethical concerns.

And this type of BS is destroying the ability of people to obtain good medical experiments that may save their lives. Now if someone wants a new face and is willing to take the deep risk of immune suppression drugs then what business is it of doctors, the FDA, or anyone else?