Digital News Report- The first face transplant in the US was performed at the Cleveland Clinic in Ohio. Dr. Maria Sieminow led the team of eight transplant surgeons who performed the operation. Though the identity of the patient and the cause of her disfigurement have been kept confidential, it has been reported that up to 80% of her face was replaced. According to the Los Angeles Times she “had no upper jaw, nose, cheeks or lower eyelids and was unable to eat, talk, smile, smell or breathe on her own.”
The patient will have to take antirejection drugs for the rest of her life, but there is no guarantee that they will work. In case of rejection, the transplant team will replace skin with grafts taken from her own body.
Three partial face transplants have since 2005. The first took place in November 2005 in France after a young woman named Isabelle Dinoire had her face ravaged by her dog. Her nose and mouth was replaced during the surgery. In April, 2006, a similar operation occurred at the Xijing military hospital in Xian, China. In this surgery they transplanted the cheek, upper lip, and nose of Li Guoxing, who was mauled by a bear while protecting his sheep.
“If there is nothing else to be done, it actually makes sense for them to take a risk that involves death,” Caplan, the director of the center for bioethics at the University of Pennsylvania, said. “It’s ethically justifiable.”
Others are not so optimistic. Arthur Caplan, a bioethicist at the University of Pennsylvania said that, “the biggest ethical problem is dealing with failure — if your face rejects. It would be a living hell. If your face is falling off and you can’t eat and you can’t breathe and you’re suffering in a terrible manner that can’t be reversed, you need to put on the table assistance in dying. There are patients who can benefit tremendously from this. It’s great that it happened.”