He thinks that the risks are worth taking and that it’s time to test the surgery. “Caution by itself will not get us any closer. If Christopher Columbus were cautious I’d probably be speaking with a British accent.” As the Scotsman reports, he and his team are in the process of requesting formal permission to go ahead with the controversial procedure. They plan to start hunting for donors and screening prospective patients as soon as they get the green light from the university’s Institutional Review Board which vets new research proposals.
James Partridge, chief executive of the Changing Faces charity which supports people with disfigurements, said there are still too many unknowns in face transplant research to consider making it reality. He says, “We remain extremely sceptical that this sort of science fiction procedure is ready to be tested, and whether or not they are ready to do it, and I would hope the university authorities would say no and put the brakes on that sort of work being done here.” He added, “There are far too many questions still unanswered for us to give anything more than a very sceptical response to this idea. Most importantly is the whole identity issue which psychologists are now looking at in detail about how patients and families would feel about taking on somebody else’s face.”
I say that as long as they are confident in the chances of success for the procedure, denying it on the basis of ethical or physcological concerns is ridiculous. First of all, who cares how the families would feel about it–it’s the patient’s wishes and well being that matters, the family can just learn to deal with it. Secondly, I find it difficult to believe that most patients with severe facial trauma would find dealing with someone else’s face to be worse than dealing with their own horribly disfigured one. Eventually, I imagine that new techniques in facial reconstruction will make transplants unneccessary. But until then, transplants may be the only viable alternative for some people. I say that doctors and committes have no business deciding on this one. Leave it up to the patients to decide.
I may have misunderstood what James Partridge meant when he talked about how patients and families would feel about taking on somebody else’s face. Perhaps he was thinking more about the families of the deceased donors? THAT I can understand as being a legitimate concern. However, there are other articles about this story, which mention that when a face is transplanted, it wouldn’t look the same on the recipient as it did on the donor, due to the skull differences, presumably. So this concern may be partially unwarranted.