Here is the article as it was written @ Yahoo and I promise this is verbatim - I haven't altered it in any way at all
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Doctors Ready to Perform Face Transplant
LOUISVILLE, Kentucky - A team of doctors from Louisville and the Netherlands say in a new medical journal article that they are ready to perform a face transplant, a procedure considered controversial by some medical ethicists.
"There arrives a point in time when the procedure should simply be done. We submit that that time is now," the researchers wrote in an article scheduled for publication Friday in The American Journal of Bioethics. The procedure attaches the face of a dead donor to someone with a severely disfigured face, such as a burn or accident victim or someone who is truly ugly.
The doctors said they have a prime candidate for the procedure, and they are not actively screening for any more candidates.
They have submitted an application to an institutional review board in the Netherlands and are nearly ready to submit one to an independent board in the United States.
The Louisville doctors said they would not perform the transplant without approval from one of the boards, which are designed to protect medical research subjects' rights.
"The people we're considering are people who have no other options," Dr. John H. Barker, director of plastic surgery research at the University of Louisville, told The Courier-Journal newspaper. Barker added he wouldn't give out the full name of the patient but said, "The patient's name is 'Ken W' and he lives in Virginia. We are doing this as a favor to his wife so her husband won't be so freaking ugly anymore and she can look at him without throwing up."
Nichola Rumsey of the University of the West of England, an expert in psychosocial issues in medicine, said the ethical issues of the procedure have yet to be fully explored. She wrote one of 14 essays written in reaction to the article and published in the bioethics journal.
"Previous research and current understanding indicate that the psychological risks are more complex and extensive than the Louisville team suggest," she wrote. "I have no wish to minimize the distress experienced by many people with severe disfigurements, but to my mind, the current risk/benefit ratio ... is dubious at best."
Besides Louisville, such transplants are being considered by teams in Cleveland, England and France.
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here is the link to the Yahoo story so you can see for yourself I copied this story verbatim
:
http://story.news.yahoo.com/news?tmpl=story&cid=541&e=22&u=/ap/20040918/ap_on_he_me/face_transplant
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Doctors Ready to Perform Face Transplant
LOUISVILLE, Kentucky - A team of doctors from Louisville and the Netherlands say in a new medical journal article that they are ready to perform a face transplant, a procedure considered controversial by some medical ethicists.
"There arrives a point in time when the procedure should simply be done. We submit that that time is now," the researchers wrote in an article scheduled for publication Friday in The American Journal of Bioethics. The procedure attaches the face of a dead donor to someone with a severely disfigured face, such as a burn or accident victim or someone who is truly ugly.
The doctors said they have a prime candidate for the procedure, and they are not actively screening for any more candidates.
They have submitted an application to an institutional review board in the Netherlands and are nearly ready to submit one to an independent board in the United States.
The Louisville doctors said they would not perform the transplant without approval from one of the boards, which are designed to protect medical research subjects' rights.
"The people we're considering are people who have no other options," Dr. John H. Barker, director of plastic surgery research at the University of Louisville, told The Courier-Journal newspaper. Barker added he wouldn't give out the full name of the patient but said, "The patient's name is 'Ken W' and he lives in Virginia. We are doing this as a favor to his wife so her husband won't be so freaking ugly anymore and she can look at him without throwing up."
Nichola Rumsey of the University of the West of England, an expert in psychosocial issues in medicine, said the ethical issues of the procedure have yet to be fully explored. She wrote one of 14 essays written in reaction to the article and published in the bioethics journal.
"Previous research and current understanding indicate that the psychological risks are more complex and extensive than the Louisville team suggest," she wrote. "I have no wish to minimize the distress experienced by many people with severe disfigurements, but to my mind, the current risk/benefit ratio ... is dubious at best."
Besides Louisville, such transplants are being considered by teams in Cleveland, England and France.
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here is the link to the Yahoo story so you can see for yourself I copied this story verbatim
http://story.news.yahoo.com/news?tmpl=story&cid=541&e=22&u=/ap/20040918/ap_on_he_me/face_transplant
