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French doctors have successfully transplanted a face. So far the storyline for movies such as the John Travolta/Nicolas Cage Face/Off, face transplants represent a big step forward (backward? sideways?) in transplant surgery. A skin graft here and there is one thing; a new face—someone else's—is another.

According to The Washington Post, the partial face graft was intended to help someone who had been badly injured by a dog—so much so that she had difficulty eating and speaking. Nose, lips, and chin were included. There seems to have been some disagreement among doctors as to whether this was a last resort. The ethics committee had apparently approved the procedure only as a last resort. And a leading French medical ethicist has denounced it as an "experiment" conducted with "undue haste."

The Post reports that controversy has followed:

News of the operation brought criticism from some medical ethicists, who questioned whether a high-risk transplant should be performed for cosmetic reasons on patients who do not have life-threatening injuries. There also are potential psychological ramifications for patients in swapping one of the most personal and individual features of a body, which for many people is a reflection of persona.

For many people? That does seem like an understatement!

Then an even more bizarre twist to the story—or two twists. According to the UK Guardian newspaper, not only has the surgery been condemned as unethical, both the women involved—the recipient and the dead donor—had attempted suicide:

Transplant patient Isabelle Dinoire, from Valenciennes, north of Amiens, was reported to have overdosed on pills last May following a row with one of her two daughters. As she lay unconscious, part of her nose, her mouth and chin were bitten off by her Labrador-cross dog, Tania.

The donor, whose name has not been released, was said to have been of a similar age and from the same area as Ms Dinoire. She had hanged herself. Permission for the transplant was given by her family after she was declared brain dead.

Just to add to the complexity of the story, according to The Washington Post, the physician involved has denied The Guardian's suicide report.

What do we make of this? It could be wonderful news for the woman whose face has been repaired, if she's not already suffering psychologically as an attempted suicide would suggest. It seemed at first to raise no special issues in respect of the donor. Either the person who dies or a close relative has generally to approve transplants, though if she committed suicide this may not be simple at all.

Deeper problems lie elsewhere. What are the implications of this kind of surgery for personal identity? How much is the look of our face something that is part of "us"? Of course, burn victims and others can have their faces radically changed, and they still remain the people they once were.

But where is this headed? A brain transplant? That, of course, would raise the question of who had been transplanted to whom! And it is not likely in the near future. But the idea that our bodies are basically LEGOs that can be rearranged at will is not quite convincing.

Wesley Smith updates us on the amazing properties of cord blood in a fine piece for The Weekly Standard. Anyone who has followed the debate knows that the blood in a baby's umbilical cord, usually thrown away, has almost magical properties.

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December (Web-only) 2005, Vol. 49