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...

[GladesGuru]

If what you are referring to is a cse of a male raping a female, in just what way would the man not be the one making the ethical decision (not to mention the repehensible decision, the criminal decision, etc.)?

[GladesGuru]

Did you miss something? The Lehrer reference was to a song about plagarism.

I suspect the Yeats case was not about plagarism, but what do I know? ;-)

[On the Road to Serfdom]

If what you are referring to is a cse of a male raping a female, in just what way would the man not be the one making the ethical decision (not to mention the repehensible decision, the criminal decision, etc.)?

Here is what I was replying to:

Fintan: I suppose abortion on demand doesn't require a dialogue about "ethics" from doctors...

Your Reply to Fintan: Abortion would seem to be primarily an ethical decision for the woman.

It can become an "issue" for others, for media, ad nauseam. But the actual decision is the woman's as she must make that decision.

I took this to mean you are saying that [male?] doctors have no business contemplating the ethics of abortion. Otherwise I don’t see the point of your reply to Fintan.

My reply to you was saying that by your logic, women have no business contemplating the ethics of rape [in a male rapist female victim scenario]. The "ethical decision" would be the potential rapist's, true. My point was that people other than potential rapists can have a dialog about the ethics of rape, just as doctors can have a dialog about the ethics of abortion. (By potential rapist I mean someone who is seriously considering rape and must make a decision about it.)

[On the Road to Serfdom]

It looks to me that the Yates reference was a reply to your previous abortion post not your Lehrer post.

[hocndoc]

Thanks, On the Road!

GG: Perhaps you missed something: I was answering # 37. As in "mother's choice." There's a notation at the bottome of each post that shows this information.

The reference was that there is little reason to separate the 5 month old before birth from the 5 month old after birth, except artificial laws.

In fact, if you'll look at any ethics book, few humans would meet the usual criteria for "personhood" given by these elitists until at least 3 or 4 years old.

On the other hand, some of us would recognize all of our children as deserving protection from killing and even being placed in harm's way by consideration about whether or not they are persons.

Of course we are each responsible for our own actions. In this country, the laws concerning which beings are to be protected from killing and which are not, as well as the criteria for licensing and regulations on the practice of medicine are decided by the people.

That's us - not the elite in the form of ethicists, lawyers or judges - the people and our elected representatives.

So, each legal action in this country is done by my hand and my consent. And since I'm a family physician, there are those who would make certain that I actually do them on demand.