Hugh Pickens writes "A Chinese medical team led by Shuzhong Guo of the Fourth Military Medical University in Xi'an has successfully completed the first transplant to include facial bone in a transplant on a man whose face was slashed by a bear. The Chinese graft included muscles, nerves, blood vessels, cartilage and skin and included an intact salivary gland, another first. Two years after the procedure, the man can eat, drink and speak, thanks to the gradual fusing of transplanted nerves and muscles with what remained of the patient's own. This transplant together with the another ground breaking transplant last year by French doctors that removed a huge tumor that had completely infiltrated and disfigured their patient's face, now sets the stage for a full facial transplant. "I think it might be possible, but we have to find a patient, and there's a technical problem transplanting eyelids," says Jean-Michel Dubernard of the Edouard Herriot Hospital in Lyon. The eyelid is the main technical challenge, because the nerves and muscles that operate it reside both outside the eye socket and within it. Maria Siemionow of the Cleveland Clinic in Ohio is the only holder in the US of approval to do a transplant and says her team is still preparing for the possibility of doing facial transplants. "It's taking time to get agreement on this, not just in the institutions involved, but in society generally," says Siemionow."
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... for a few months only to return with somewhat different personalities, that's when I think we'll have to worry if the mainland is invading the island without a shot being fired.
When prominent Taiwan citizens disappear ... (Score:1)