French Woman Receives Face Transplant

In a controvercial new surgery, a woman in France has received a face transplant!

Now burn victims can consider another option: a face transplant. Last week French doctors performed the first partial procedure when they gave a brain-dead patient’s mouth, nose and chin to a 38-year-old woman mauled by a dog. In the United States, doctors at the Cleveland Clinic, whose institutional review board last year approved the experimental treatment, are interviewing potential patients who would receive entire faces from donors. “At this stage, we are planning face transplants only for severely disfigured patients who have exhausted all conventional options,” says Maria Siemionow, director of plastic-surgery research at the Cleveland Clinic. - Newsweek