THE controversial hand transplant operation that took place in a French hospital last week raises the prospect of something even more macabrea human face transplant.
While doctors in Lyon continue to closely monitor Clint Hallam and his hand for signs of rejection, a rival American team is gearing up for many similar operations. "We'll do at least 10 of these in the coming year," says John Barker, a plastic surgeon at the University of Louisville in Kentucky.
Whereas most transplants involve grafting only single organs or tissues, a hand transplant requires skin, muscles, nerves and bone all to be grafted at once. This makes hand transplants a good way of testing drug combinations that might stop the body rejecting multiple tissue grafts, especially ones involving skin, the most immunogenic tissue.
Ultimately, Barker predicts that the greatest demand for such transplants will come from patients who lose their faces in a ...
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