Whimsical Lair

An excerpt of today’s news - French woman has first partial face transplant.

LYON, France (Reuters) - French surgeons have performed what they said on Wednesday was the world’s first partial face transplant — giving a new nose, chin and lips to a woman savaged by a dog.

Specialists from two French hospitals carried out the operation on a 38-year-old woman on Sunday in the northern city of Amiens by grafting on tissues, muscles, arteries and veins from a brain-dead woman. "The patient is in an excellent state and the transplant looks normal," the hospitals said in a brief statement after waiting three days to announce the pioneering surgery.

The woman, who was not identified, had been left without a nose and lips after the dog attacked her last May, and was unable to talk or chew properly.

It appears that the old debacle over the morality of intervenious medical science is back on the burner. Previously it was the morality of bearing a child for the sake of providing a bone marrow for his/her sibling who is dying of leukemia, euthanasia on issues of the right to live or the right to die, on abortions, on transgender operations and its implication on religion and values of society, on plastic surgeries, on skin grafting procedures, on organ transplants, cloning etc etc.

Now you take another person’s nose and lips (note the other debacle about whether someone who is brain dead is really dead though according to medical science a person is properly dead once he/she is brain dead) and plaster it on someone else? Hmm I think this will raise more concerns on ‘morals and values’ of the human society considering the donor would not be able to properly consent (assuming one never consented to having the nose and lips grafted upon death) - until the issues may be sorted out on the morality of taking organs from those who has not in their lifetime consented to donate them vs the right to the quality of life of those who are alive but horribly disfigured, i doubt there this issue may be resolved.

Morality and values are deemed and judged by society. Note the cultural and religious differences between societies and the values appreciated by them - I doubt there is a certain standard that can be deemed as a ’societal value’ that may be shared by all. Medical science on the other hand is judged by the advancement of the human mind and capability to reduce the suffering and/or to save the lives of people.

I doubt there will ever be a consensus on these issues. To be or not to be … that is the question.

This entry was posted on Wednesday, November 30th, 2005 at 5:41 pm and is filed under Current Affairs. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can skip to the end and leave a response. Pinging is currently not allowed.